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First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2018

Copyright © Lorna Gray 2018

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Lorna Gray asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008279592

Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008279585

Version: 2018-06-08

For my family

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

A Letter From the Author to the Reader

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading…

Also by Lorna Gray

About the Author

About HarperImpulse

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

I have been taught that I must appreciate the origin of a thing before I can truly understand its meaning. This is because my father has a passion for antiques and he is a man obsessed by the written record, the provenance that proves where an item began its life and charts its path through time. For him, provenance does more than add value to a precious object by declaring it to be a genuine relic from some notable moment in history. It ties him to long-gone human lives. It gives him a chance to touch what they have touched and take their stories as his own.

Very well – put in those terms, the provenance of my story is this: I grew up in London and my teenage years were an unspeakable mess of war. I belong to that unheroic generation of girls who were too old to be evacuated with the smaller children but too young to lend my weight to the war effort. While older women were called up to save the nation by building aeroplanes or tilling the land or were generally being terribly useful in the WAAF or as a WREN, I did nothing very useful at all. If anyone has ever wondered who did the mundane work behind shop counters after those brave women went off to be busy elsewhere, the answer is that the ordinary, everyday work was fulfilled by girls like me.

At the age of fourteen I left a life of disrupted lessons in a dingy air-raid shelter for a daily journey to work in Knightsbridge. I watched through dirty bus windows as, day by day, the bold London landmarks that had charted my youth fell prey to the destructive power of the Blitz. And I did nothing.

Now, though, the war is over. The recent past has grown a little brighter; a little clearer. The whine that was once the sirens and dogfights of yesteryear has become, these days, really nothing more sinister than the shriek of black swifts that tumble playfully in summer skies. Although, even their cries have been silenced of late. This is because the little birds left about a week ago to pass onwards on their migration and their departure has been a fitting companion for the decision I made last Saturday. The one where I gave notice to my employer and decided that after two years of peace it was time to stop worrying that childhood had made me a passive witness to conflict. It was time I took my life off its war footing and found what hope this adult life could bring.

Unfortunately, before announcing this grand scheme to my parents, I really ought to have remembered that I am abysmally poor at speaking what I feel under pressure.

I know now what my father suspected. After all, I’ve already mentioned that my father believes that the key to everything lies in understanding the past. So if I’d hoped to get my parents to listen to what I really wanted to do with my future, I should have chosen an easier excuse than my determination to stop living each day like London in peacetime was just the same as war and always stifling.

It probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. My parents found it far more digestible to deduce that their young daughter had been made restless by the after-effects of an unfortunate romance. And since I couldn’t entirely refute it, the only compromise we could agree on was the exchange of this urban post-war stagnation for an altogether different kind of peace in the form of a long overdue visit to a spinster cousin in the timeless Cotswolds. My parents saw her as a usefully dithering older relation who would act out the time-worn part of a cautionary tale and save me from tripping into bitter independence. I thought my parents were mistaking me for someone else. My life so far had not exactly been renowned for its brave choices. The fact I’d let them argue me into coming here was proof enough of that, I should have thought.

Anyway, irrespective of all that, I’d have stood a rather greater chance of receiving this cautionary experience had my cousin actually been at home when I arrived.

In fact, by her absence, my cousin is responsible for many things. Had she met me at the bus stop as she had promised, I wouldn’t have been forced to walk the two miles alone with my case to her tiny cottage at the bottom of this dusty valley. If she’d been at home when I finally arrived here, I would have had her company instead of nothing but the mile upon mile of blue sky – a novelty in itself after the smogs of London – and my only neighbour wouldn’t have been the deserted single-storey building that stood just beyond the turn of the track about a hundred yards upstream, firmly dispelling the fantasy of a simple life passed in a rustic hovel. My cousin’s company might also have eased the disorientating sense of loneliness after the important bustle of leaving London, which was only broken by the distant telephone that proceeded to ring on and off for the next three hours.

She certainly might have known who the owners were and decided to do something about it before the sun dipped below the ridgetop behind me. And if she had, when I finally gave in and took it upon myself to labour my way back up that trackway with the view of at least seeing if I could be of any use, I could have either escaped or averted this fresh proof that conflict stalked everywhere, even in peacetime. I certainly wouldn’t have found an old man lying flat out on his garden path beneath peas and feathery carrot-tops, with a wound to his head.

Chapter 2

He wasn’t alone. I arrived at the moment that the fellow who had been trying to help him had to rapidly set him down on the crude stone slabs of the path because the old man’s weight had grown too much.

I was beside them before the old man had even stopped falling. Despite my first impression, this was not an act of war. There were no armies here, no great propaganda campaigns to tell us which nations were on the side of right. I had to make up my own mind and all I saw was a poor old man who had lately bashed his head and made it nearly to his own front step before abruptly succumbing to the shock. I remember his face vividly. There was a greyness to it. His skin was creased by age, with fine woolly hair over the top. He was wearing the coarse shirt and heavy brown trousers of the ordinary countryman. His garden path was a narrow line between overcrowded beds and he stirred a little as I reached his side. One side of his face was gritty from his fall. There was a smear of blood on his right hand that spread to my arm as he watched with that blank instinct that comes from partial consciousness while I dropped into a crouch and examined him.

I don’t remember the second man. He remains an infuriatingly formless shape in my memory of that day. The image has been subsequently enhanced by the memory of other encounters in other places at different times, but that day I only saw the way he was tugging ineffectually at the fallen man’s gardening coat in an attempt to make the old man rise and that he surrendered the invalid’s care to me just as soon as I reached his side. He did it with relief, it seemed to me. I remember the hasty instruction he gave to stay and do what I could, and the way his dirtied hand briefly patted my shoulder as he slipped out past me towards the gate. I heard the breathless urgency in his voice as he said that he would fetch better help. I barely looked at him. My eyes were all for that semi-conscious old man and the awful graze on his temple, and the flies that clustered everywhere.

It was about three minutes later when I caught again the renewed ringing of that solitary mark of human companionableness – the still distant telephone – that it dawned on me how strangely the man had made his exit. I also realised just how brutally silent everything else was. The telephone wasn’t close by; there were no telegraph wires reaching across this disordered triangle of five or so dwellings, but that persistent drone was near enough to prove the point. Clearly, wherever the other man had gone, he certainly hadn’t gone to call the doctor.

Suddenly it felt utterly exposed to be crouching over the old man like this. We were enclosed in a cocoon of greenery where anyone might be watching us and yet we might not see them. It was a very raw means of lurching into the sudden twist of considering what had really happened here. My search of those blazing shadows was stilled between telephone rings when the rattle of a car engine rose like a skylark on the air.

The busy traffic of London was unknown here. This single car claimed the entire valley as its audience. I’d thought at first it was departing; that it showed that the man was making his departure even more final. But the thread of sound became more defined, pausing only for the brief mumble as it met a gate across the lane, before continuing its ascent once more from the valley bottom. Now it was running along the ridgetop just above the village. I had the awfulness of waiting here with the sudden sense of my uselessness if it should turn out that this car was carrying the man back to us. I didn’t know what it would mean for me if he should return in an entirely different spirit to the sort that brought assistance. Because I had no doubt at all that if no one had been near enough to answer that telephone, certainly no one would hear any shout of mine.

The car didn’t veer harmlessly away to leave me with nothing but a sense of my stupidity for cringing here while better help passed us by. I waited, braced amongst the bees to do Lord knows what, while the whining engine turned off the lane at the plain stone barn and dropped into the village triangle.

It stopped. A voice spoke to another inside the neat little burgundy runabout and then a man and his small white dog got out.

He wasn’t the man who had left me here on this path. This man was tanned and fair-haired, or at least had ordinary hair made fair by the sun, and he was of that age, about thirty, where these days you could be reasonably certain he’d encountered harder scenes than this during his war service. He certainly reacted quickly now. Quicker than I did. I shot to my feet and he’d passed me with a hand to my arm to set me to one side before I’d even spoken. Somehow I’d anticipated more discussion first. So I staggered there and dithered while he dropped to one knee by the old man’s side, and felt I ought to be barring his path or helping or something; and discovered instead that he was harmless and I wasn’t needed, and found time to notice the ugly streak down my wrist and to reel from it and feel a little sick.

A voice demanded my attention. It was the driver of the car. He’d climbed out and now he was standing in the gateway and saying, ‘You must be Miss Sutton, I presume? What’s happened to Mr Winstone here, do you know?’

It was a relief to be recalled to the gate by the car driver’s questions. It was like stepping out into a summer’s day. Behind me, the invalid was still befuddled and his crooked old hand was bloodier than ever where it had touched his head. The small cottage that loomed over him was made of crumbling stone, and so were its neighbours on this narrow terrace. I was rubbing heat back into my skin, a gesture of general uncertainty about my role here and whether it really was right that I was surrendering responsibility for Mr Winstone’s welfare to the kneeling man like this, and I had to shudder as I discovered what lay under my grip for a second time.

The man I met at the gate prompted me into speech. He ducked his head to meet my eye – his eyes were brown and alert and he was very tall. This was a deliberate attempt to establish control. He wouldn’t have known it but the technique was familiar. It was amiable enough but it wasn’t far removed from the methods the air-raid wardens had used to instil calm in panicked slum dwellers after they had abruptly discovered a void where the house next door had been.

I imagine the technique had been well used in the London Blitz, but it certainly didn’t work on me now. This man woke me to the disquiet that lurked within and I forgot the stain on my arm and said with a voice made sharp by suspicion, ‘What do you mean ‘presume’? How do you know who I am? And who is he?’

Along the path, I saw that Mr Winstone had managed to sit up and was feeling his head and talking, or possibly cursing, to the younger man, who was resting on one knee beside him amongst the spilling geraniums. Old Mr Winstone spoke in the elongated vowels of the West Country. The younger man had a tanned hand lying easily across the point of his other knee with a finger hooked into the collar of his enthusiastic dog. His manner was intense and restrained to gentleness all at the same time. His accent was softer than the old man’s. He looked and sounded like a working man; rough clothes over strong limbs.

In quite a different tone, the taller man by my side told me calmly, ‘He’s Danny Hannis. Bertie Winstone’s son.’

Briefly, very briefly, my gaze flickered from its watch on the path to this man’s face. His mouth formed a benign acknowledgement of the difference in names. He amended, ‘Stepson. Danny was in town to pick up a part for the tractor, so it made sense to come home with me. He knows I take my car on a Wednesday. I know who you are because we don’t get many visitors to these parts and, besides, I’m a friend of your cousin. She didn’t tell me directly that you were coming, but word gets about. I’m Matthew Croft, by the way. How did you find him like this?’

There, amongst the patient answers to my questions, was the real question of his own.

I stopped trying to goad myself into a distress of helplessness and looked straight at him for the first time. He was older than his friend by a few years in a way that made him too old for me but probably very suitable for my cousin. Since my mind was still clearly struggling to let down its guard and determined to record every detail it could now, I also happened to notice that his hair was fair, his eyes were very dark in this violet sunset, and his clothes and general demeanour made it seem more likely that he was on his way home from a day in the office rather than a day in the fields.

When my mind finally decided after all this that it was time to answer his question before he had to repeat it a third time, I found myself saying on a note of disbelief, ‘There was a man. He went that way.’ I pointed my hand towards the corner of the lane, with a vague bias for the direction it took along the ridgetop past that barn towards the gated section and downhill, perhaps, to the valley bottom. ‘He had a pale jacket …’

I caught Matthew Croft’s expression. It broke through my seriousness and left a rueful smile in its place. I was not, it seemed, destined to be a very valuable witness.

Danny Hannis must have lately arrived at pretty much the same conclusion about his stepfather. Mr Winstone didn’t seem to know who had left him on the floor either. Danny’s swift glance along the path towards his friend was like a brief release of concealed impatience. It came in a blast and then his gaze moved on to me. At this range his eyes looked blue or perhaps green and very clear indeed. And rather too sharp. He saw the blood on me. His look began as a question but it was a shock to see my own suspicion reflected there upon his face.

I heard myself saying quite automatically, ‘You know, since that fellow is presumably not coming back again to pick up Mr Winstone after all, shall we have a go at patching him up ourselves?’

It was for once the right thing to say. Suspicion evaporated for all of us. I saw Matthew Croft’s nod. He beckoned and I heard the creak behind as a youth scrambled out of the car and we all bustled Mr Winstone into the house. Inside, this place was no bigger than the average worker’s terrace in a London slum and if Danny Hannis lived here with his stepfather, it amazed me that there should have been enough space for him. The old man himself was settled into the dipped seat of an armchair and the younger men propped him there while I scurried into the equally diminutive kitchen to scour my skin free of that revolting stain. There was no tap, only a stone sink and a jug of water drawn from the village pump, but there was soap and a good cloth and at last my skin was pink and clean and I could stop acting like a shocked bystander and think of going back and offering help in the other room.

I didn’t stay there for long. I found myself being sent back into the kitchen very smartly on an order from Matthew Croft to do something useful like preparing warm water using the kettle on the stove.

The ancient cooking range was the sort that had to be lit in the morning and kept lit all day if any cooking was to be done, even in summer. It was sweltering in that tiny space and it took about ten minutes to heat the water. I reappeared in the doorway with a basin and a clean cloth in time to make Danny Hannis abandon the question he had been about to ask and rise instead from his crouch before the old man. ‘Come along, Pop,’ he said with that slight slant to the voice that men use to imply considerable care. ‘Bear up. What’s all this you’re saying about water? You didn’t get a good look, I suppose?’ This last was meant as a question for me without so much as turning his head.

I couldn’t tell him anything about any water beyond the basin in my hands. There was no need to say anything about burglary either. I’d overheard them eliminating that much and, besides, both the kitchen and this equally tiny living room were perfectly clear of signs of invasion. I might have still held out some hope that the departed male had merely been an awkward neighbour helping the old man home after a fall. Except that I could see now that my usefulness in the kitchen had the air of being inspired by that all too familiar division based on gender – and therefore presumed fitness to bear the hard truth.

I also believed Matthew Croft had only encouraged Danny to ask me his question in order to pave the way for giving me firm thanks and sending me on my way. I could tell they’d discussed this from the way Danny reacted when I repeated the all too brief description of a male with dark hair and a pale jacket. He hadn’t expected me to have anything to add. I was, in fact, forgotten at the instant I began speaking and Danny Hannis returned to his crouched position before the armchair. His hand went out to Mr Winstone’s where it rested upon the arm of his chair, and he fixed the old man with the most compelling concern I have ever seen and it shook me.

I heard him repeat for what had to be the hundredth time, ‘What happened to you, Pop? What could possibly motivate someone to bash you over the head?’

And if I had ever really felt I might need to stay to defend Mr Winstone from this man, the feeling was dispelled here. There was, beneath the search for information, genuine bewilderment in his voice.

It was at that moment that fresh voices came from the path and the owners of them entered through the front door. And when I say these newcomers brought a sharp return of tension, this feeling was based on Danny’s reaction rather than mine.

Chapter 3

The first to come in was a woman in her mid-thirties, who matched Matthew Croft in being rather taller than the norm for her sex. She stopped on the threshold, took in the oddity of a scene where the old man was sitting in his armchair surrounded by his stepson, a friend and a stranger. Then she stepped in and moved Danny aside from his place before his stepfather’s chair with a murmur and a familiar touch to his wrist.

She was the sort of woman who might have posed for any of the propaganda photographs that had proliferated during the war; the sort where capable women in crisply tailored uniforms were caught in the last dramatic moment before setting off on a mad uncharted flight across England in order to deliver a new aircraft to its crew. Now she was asking Danny Hannis to explain how the old man could pass from being well and unharmed at her house a few hours ago, to this. I gathered she was a Mrs Abbey, who lived a short distance away. She was not only an older and decidedly more self-assured woman than I; she was also braver. Her hands went straight to the wound on Mr Winstone’s head.

The other woman had a less practical reaction. She was a motherly sort of person of about fifty. She wasn’t overweight, but comfortable with very fair hair of that sort that barely shows grey set in tight curls around her head, and she was clearly Danny’s mother and Mr Winstone’s wife. It was the combination of Mrs Winstone’s concern and Mrs Abbey’s uninterrupted bossiness that led me to realise that Matthew Croft hadn’t actually been practising that time-worn method of instilling calm by organising any stray womenfolk into running errands in another room. Just me.

It must be said that I didn’t really mind. This part of my discovery wasn’t what mattered here. Because I must admit that, to an extent, I’d understood why he should have thought that Mr Winstone’s distress hadn’t wanted a stranger’s invasive fussing. It hadn’t slipped my notice that there was something intensely personal about the old man’s confusion and the care that had been given here. And I would have gone easily when I’d realised what he wanted. He needn’t have thought I would have stayed to argue the point like some fearsome busybody or, worse, some frightened young thing needing to be shielded from the dread of walking home.

What did matter, though, was that when I saw his easy acceptance of Mrs Winstone’s right to ask any questions she chose, it served to make me very aware of the difference in his friend’s behaviour to Mrs Abbey.

I’d thought Danny Hannis had been preoccupied but reasonably pleasant before. I didn’t believe he had cared about me, beyond that effort of establishing my value as a witness to a distressing scene. Now I was unobtrusively watching him from my place in the kitchen doorway. Mrs Abbey had placed him against the wall beside his mother and I became acutely aware that while he was answering some of his mother’s agitated questions, the ones that weren’t answered by his friend at least, his attention was all for the other woman. Perhaps it was the unforgiving light – there was no electricity in this village to beat back the coming dusk – but I thought he was watching her and wearing that shuttered expression a man gets when he is uncomfortable but constrained enough by convention to keep from expressing the feeling out loud.

I wouldn’t say that his expression conveyed dislike. His mouth seemed able to form a smile readily enough when Mrs Abbey directed some comment at him. I might have worried that his unease lay in a wish to keep her from hearing the details of what had befallen Mr Winstone, except that he seemed to be making no effort to prevent his mother from thoroughly dissecting the lot.

Mrs Abbey was teasing some of the crusted hair aside to permit a clearer view. She was the sort who demonstrated the unbending practicality of one who was very much in the habit of getting on with things because no one else would be doing them for her. I thought she bore the shadow of what might have been wartime widowhood in the lines about her mouth and the neat order of her clothes. Presently, though, Danny Hannis and I both could see that the woman’s decisiveness meant she was probing vigorously at Mr Winstone’s head when she might just as well have left it alone.

Revulsion, both from her actions and the man’s strange powerlessness, made me lurch into saying to Matthew Croft, ‘Did you want me to clean up Mr Winstone? That is why you asked me to fetch hot water, isn’t it?’

Matthew Croft was standing very near me in the gloomy space between Mr Winstone’s shoulder and the sideboard that was set against the kitchen wall. He turned his head as I added haplessly, ‘I worked behind a chemist’s counter for six years; that must be a training of sorts for this kind of thing, mustn’t it?’

Heaven knows what I was thinking, saying that. It was purely a product of unease. Or an impulse to interfere since this other man had sent me scurrying for the hot water in the first place, or be helpful, or something. I regretted my offer just as soon as my gaze returned to the mess Mrs Abbey was uncovering on Mr Winstone’s head because it was, in fact, my idea of a nightmare to begin dabbing that crusted hair.

Luckily, Matthew Croft was seemingly oblivious to the way Danny might have thanked him for seizing this chance to diminish Mrs Abbey’s control of this room. He was also consistent in his effort to manage the stresses that had been working on me, as I now understood he had been doing all along.

I found myself being relieved of the steaming basin and then returning to the kitchen on a fruitless hunt for antiseptic. It was a charade, for him and for me, because he had no real idea of there being any antiseptic and I went straight to the sink in this rustic back room and used the curiosity of peering through the window above it as an opportunity to undertake an equally fruitless search for the house that sheltered the distant telephone.

I perceived a high garden wall, the stunted church tower and perhaps the roof of a distant barn and that was all. I pretended that I was looking out as a means of soothing away the intense strangeness that was coming in waves from those people behind me. It was also a way of escaping the vision of untrained hands running over a head stained with all that drying blood. In truth, I believe I was really bracing myself, all the while, for the news that Mrs Abbey had been sent in after me.

I’d thought she would be. If Danny had really wanted to exclude her, he might have taken this chance to ask her to help the stranger find whatever it was that Matthew Croft wanted. I found my hands were gripping the smooth stone rim of the sink in readiness for the turn to meet her. But I didn’t need to. Because in that room behind me, I knew that she had taken the basin straight out of Matthew Croft’s hands and now she was dabbing at a clot on Mr Winstone’s head with that neglected cloth.

In this room, the homeliness of a ringing telephone made me think of doing what I ought to have done in the first place. I reset the kettle on the hot plate and boiled it to make Mr Winstone a strong cup of sugary tea.

I had barely made it when I was called back into that cramped room again by the clear mention of, ‘Miss Sutton.’

It was Danny giving my name to his mother. Mrs Winstone had finished bewailing the time she had wasted languishing in the clutches of the girl who set her hair and instead was wondering who had found her husband. And Danny was now requiring me to repeat my pathetically unsatisfying description of male with dark hair and a pale jacket and it made this crowded house suffocating because the description didn’t inspire recognition in anyone and I didn’t know why Danny should suddenly have thought to include me. It wasn’t enough to imagine that he had simply wanted the witness to speak for herself.

Danny took the teacup from me and left me stranded while Mrs Winstone beamed at me. She did it in that shattering way people have of being utterly admiring of acts of kindness that are only ever foisted upon a person by circumstance. Somehow that sort of appreciation always jars for me. I didn’t want gratitude for an act that any civilised person would have done. And I didn’t want to have my own small intervention swelled into the status of a noble deed when I thought there were already quite enough tensions in this room without pretending that the incident hadn’t simply been a normal every-day blunder. Particularly when the utterly dismayed perpetrator of it had quite clearly cared enough afterwards to bring Mr Winstone home.

I must have spoken at least part of that thought out loud. Presumably the less defensive part. Mrs Winstone turned to her son. ‘This didn’t happen here? Mrs Abbey, did this happen at your house? Did this happen at Eddington?’

All eyes turned to Mrs Abbey. It happened with a suddenness that would have made my face burn crimson. I thought the lady displayed creditable poise when she only paused in her ministrations to say with sympathetic understanding, ‘Bertie visited us today, but I’m afraid I can safely promise that he wasn’t in my little yard when I stepped out to run my errand to the shop about twenty minutes after he left. I wish he had been. I can only say, Mrs Winstone, just how relieved I am that I encountered you and extracted you from your hairdresser’s house – otherwise it might have been another hour yet before you’d come home to find the old man like this.’

Mrs Abbey wasn’t congratulating herself on her timely intervention. She really did care, I think, about the delay. But as she finished I saw her gaze flick curiously over Mr Winstone’s head because Matthew Croft spoke almost immediately with a clearer question of his own for the old man. ‘Were you at Eddington to repair the pump?’

The question was so abrupt that it came out like undisguised suspicion, though I didn’t think he meant it like that. It was simply that he wasn’t bound as Danny was to this woman and he wanted to know if this explained the reference Mr Winstone had made to fiddling about with something to do with water.

‘Of course I wasn’t working on the pump.’ At last Mr Winstone spoke and his voice was as battered as his head. Five people were suddenly united in thought as we watched a veined and arthritic hand lift to sweep a shocked teardrop from the corner of his eye. A faint rattle of grit scattered to the floor. ‘That’s the boy’s job. Why aren’t you listening? Mrs Abbey only needed me to take a look at something in the house as I was passing by.’ He rounded on his stepson. ‘And I was only asked to help because you weren’t there. I told you this earlier. You know she always has something that needs doing. It was afterwards that I stopped at the turbine house. Now I’ve got to get on. Mrs Abbey here is adamant that she’s going to take me to the doctors and I’ve got plenty to do first. It’s bad enough that you …’

The old man’s voice tailed off into a jumbled agitation about his wife’s supper. He gave the impression she was very particular about meal times. I saw the blankness ripple across Danny’s face as he realised that his stepfather had at last recalled the site of his incident. I also saw the bemusement that followed as his mother slipped into real shock and began engaging everyone in a needlessly circular discussion of alternative meal choices if they were going to be late back from the doctors. And it was then that I realised that Danny did mean to use me to manage Mrs Abbey after all.

Mrs Abbey had suggested that the old man should see the doctor. Now Danny was intending to use my presence to save himself from having to tell this woman that he and his friend had already planned to use the car for precisely this purpose, and she wouldn’t be coming along.

I could tell he was about to suggest that she should walk me home. It made me wonder what kind of hold this woman had over such a man that he was contorting himself into peculiar strategies just so that he could avoid offending her. Because clearly he had no concern whatsoever about what should happen if he irritated me. It made me wonder if this uneasy tiptoeing was someone’s unhappy idea of love. And whose.

And still Mrs Abbey’s long fingers were lingering over that crust of blood in Mr Winstone’s hair.

She really was making the wound bleed again. Just a little, but all the same this was ridiculous. I was standing by the immaculate little sideboard and it struck me that the gloriously open front door was just there. It was barely three yards or more away if I slid along the mantelpiece behind Mr Winstone’s chair. I didn’t care what use Danny Hannis thought I might be. I didn’t know any of these people and I wasn’t obliged to bolster the numbers of bystanders so that Mrs Abbey could be grouped with me and with all due politeness barred from trespassing upon their visit to the doctor. And it certainly wasn’t for me to stage-manage this scene so that the particular bystander in question wouldn’t know it was Danny’s choice to cut her out of their plans.

I turned my head and abruptly discovered that Matthew Croft’s eyes had followed me as I passed him. I was beyond the barrier of the armchair now and it was hard to make out his features in this dark and busy room. I was near the small window that looked out over the garden and I didn’t think he was having the same difficulty reading mine. I didn’t like to think what he might be seeing there. He was trying to ease his way around the chair after me. He was moving quite swiftly. He meant to speak to me. I thought he meant to stop me from going. He was probably intending to assume responsibility for directing my movements again, as though someone needed to manage my shock for me after this distress. He was going to insist that I had some company, and for the sake of his friend he would probably decree that it should be Mrs Abbey. Only that woman was scolding her patient loudly. Her voice swamped all else; deliberately, I think.

She’d just been promising again that soon she would finish dabbing at his head when she told Mr Winstone clearly, ‘Don’t dramatise, Bertie. I know what you’re hinting at and I really don’t think this could possibly mean we’re set for a return to all that awfulness we had at the beginning of the year.’

She made Matthew Croft freeze in his pursuit of me. His head turned. She had the attention of the whole room when she added, ‘It’s such nonsense when we know full well this fellow today was one of those squatters from the camp. Who else could it have been? Dirty people. I always thought it was only a matter of time before something like this happened. Unless you’re going to tell us he had a limp?’

I thought she meant that last part as a joke. I saw a corner of her mouth twitch as she dropped that bloody rag back into its bowl with a soggy slap. I saw her hold up her dirtied hands, looking for somewhere to wipe them. She swiftly stepped through to the tiny kitchen to claim a towel while nobody moved. Then she stepped back into the room again and gave a shake of her head at the foolishness of it.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘The only connection this has to that sorry business is the charge that might be laid at the squire’s door because he went away and allowed those rough vagrants to settle here unchecked. If only the old fool would come home where he belonged, he’d do something about that dirty camp and we wouldn’t need to be haunted by anyone, dead or living. Although, of course …’ There was a furtive pause while she scrubbed her hands a little more before she added on a secretive whisper, as if none of us were listening, ‘between you and me I can’t imagine how he can come back when certain neighbours will persist in reminding him of his loss.’

It was an exceedingly odd statement. But my surprise was nothing to everyone else’s reaction. They weren’t surprised; they were dumbstruck. It left Matthew Croft stranded in the middle of the room and she had even silenced Mrs Winstone. But it was Danny’s reaction now that shocked. The gloom in this house was consuming everyone, but I could still see Danny. I could identify him from the intensity of concentration that passed from him to that woman.

Danny’s stillness now had an entirely different quality from the awkwardness that had prevented him from halting her dominion over his father’s treatment. His expression also swept away the fantasy I had been harbouring that there was a secret between them and it was love. The expression on his face was blank like that of a person facing a sudden resurgence of defensiveness that ran deep; deeper even than Mr Winstone’s wound.

This was because Danny could tell as well as I that the odd turn of Mrs Abbey’s speech had the taste of revenge on someone, but it wasn’t meant to rebuke Danny for his manoeuvrings over taking Mr Winstone to the doctor. I thought this was directed at Matthew Croft for his rudeness in dissecting Mr Winstone’s visit to her house, although, to do Mrs Abbey credit, I didn’t think she had meant her remarks to have this impact. This wasn’t within her control. Something very nasty began to build in the damp corner beyond the fireplace and it grew bolder when Mrs Abbey straightened.

She was flushing and trying to act as if she hadn’t said a thing. She knew she’d made a mistake. She attempted to make amends by urging Mr Winstone onto his feet and then there was a sudden rush of life back into this room as stronger hands than hers lunged to keep the old man from falling. There was a scuff as the armchair was moved aside and then a decisive lurch of men across the room towards me and the door.

I was outside before I knew it. They were driving me along from behind. After all that anticipation, the fresher air of a dusky August sky was no relief at all. The shadows chased me out. These people were disturbing me far more than any brief distress of finding an old man on his path and I thought I had remembered now what old business Mrs Abbey had stumbled into talking about. My cousin had mentioned something like this in her letters.

The squire was an old army man and my cousin called him Colonel, presumably because my cousin didn’t owe him the same deference he got from those who deemed him lord and master. Her letter had mentioned the tragedy of a son’s death in some sort of incident in the winter. She’d implied that the loss had shattered the entire community, and I’d witnessed proof myself now of its wounds. But having said so much, my cousin’s letter had declined to convey the rest, in part due to her preoccupation at that time with her own mother’s death and also to supposedly preserve tact and to save misunderstandings later. And also, I’d thought, to irritate my curiosity in that infuriating way people have when they have something they wish they could talk about but don’t want to be the gossip who tells you.

As it was, I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to find out the rest quite like this. There was an additional hint within my cousin’s letters that a local man had been caught up in the mess and I thought I had some idea now of who that local man might be.

Mrs Abbey began to rapidly retract her judgement of the old squire’s neglect of his estate. It was too late though. It was horrible but it was as if Mrs Abbey had accidentally summoned the dead son, poor man, and it was his shade, or at least the shadow of his end, that crept after us from the house.

Now she was bustling ahead and chattering about her wretched squatters instead. And all the while I thought the strangest thing of all was that no one simply swept it all away with the obvious retort that Mr Winstone hadn’t been hinting anything at all. The poor man could barely recall meeting me on his path; he certainly wasn’t giving graphic accounts of the terrors that had walked him home and connecting them to any old business that could affect people like this.

Mr Winstone was scuttling along behind her, between his helpers. He wasn’t terribly steady on his feet. It was only after they had made it through the gate and past me to move on towards the car that Danny said something rather dry that made the ugliness that had been working its tentacles after them along the path sharply turn on its heel and climb out over the garden wall. He said that he was glad that someone was on hand to give such a well-founded explanation of how his stepfather’s injury today had stemmed from that scene in March, because this was the first mention he’d heard of that tragedy for almost six months. His dry humour was for his friend’s sake. I knew it was because it drew that man’s attention from the immediate task of preventing the invalid from pitching headfirst into the side of the car. I saw Matthew Croft right the old man and then turn his head to give a surprisingly warm grin. And then I was only left with the puzzling realisation that while I had been watching and worrying over the reasons why a man like Danny Hannis might find himself unable to risk offending Mrs Abbey, I really should have been noticing that she didn’t like his friend at all.

She was, however, perfectly, convincingly repentant. She knew she’d made a crass mistake and if she didn’t, she certainly found out when it cost her the right to accompany Mr Winstone on his trip to consult the doctor. I felt almost sorry for her when she joined me just as the men were depositing their charge in the passenger seat. She had been roundly excluded from the crush as Mrs Winstone organised herself into the back seat. Danny was folding himself in beside his mother without so much as a glance for the neglected neighbour. It became all the more humbling when the small dog clambered in after them. The only person who didn’t go was the wavy-haired youth Freddy, who was hovering by the bumper in that helpful way people have when they desperately want to be useful but have no idea what to do. I thought he was waiting for orders and it belatedly occurred to me that Matthew Croft had been intending to offer the boy as my companion when he’d been trying to organise my walk home.

I didn’t mean to give Matthew Croft time to remember. I was a few yards away, at the limit of the pockmarked garden wall, and I would have left there and then except that Mrs Abbey had her hand on my arm as she told me earnestly, ‘You’ve been badly shaken by your brush with this fellow, haven’t you?’

She was speaking as though nothing else mattered beyond Mr Winstone’s injury. Perhaps nothing else did. They all knew each other, these people, and the slip about a man’s death must have been made by others before. I played for the same indifference while carefully dodging away from that clutching hand of hers. After all, it had last been seen grasping a bloody rag.

I remarked lightly, ‘Shaken by that man? No.’

She looked disbelieving. ‘You kept dithering in and out of the room all the time that we were talking.’

I conceded the point with a faintly worn smile. Rightly or wrongly, I soon took advantage of a disturbance within the car to make my getaway from all of them. That telephone was ringing again – that blessed reminder of noisy things that belonged in the companionable bustle of my familiar city life – and I went to it like it was a lifeline.

Chapter 4

Suddenly it wasn’t as late as I’d thought. I supposed escape might feel like that. The large house that stood on the opposite side of the triangle was still touched to warmth by the last of the day’s colour. It wasn’t the one that was ringing. That was coming from the other side of the village; in the space after the church but before the turn where the lane coursed away downhill. This grand house was the steward’s house and it was where my cousin had lived and grown until her father had died and her mother had retired to the cottage. I’d only visited these parts once as a child and that had been when I was eight. I barely remembered it but I did remember the village boys who had waged cheerful war with my cousin’s older brothers while my cousin scolded and I trailed about behind the lot of them like a pathetic undersized shadow. It was possible that Danny Hannis had been one of them.

The house seemed to be a boarding house for farm workers now. There was a steady stream of them passing between the steward’s house and what I’d taken earlier to be a derelict farmyard, only now it was flooded with light and crowded with men and tired carthorses. This, suddenly, was the bustle I was used to. Here the crowds took the form of dusty males ranging along the lines of various low stone walls, smoking and drinking weak beer. The farmhands were all, to a man, tanned and wiry. None of them wore a pale summer jacket. I suspected that most weren’t wealthy enough to own one.

Freddy didn’t own one either. He caught up with me before I’d even reached the point where the track veered to the right, downhill to my cousin’s cottage, or left around the lower limit of the churchyard and towards that telephone. He grinned at me as he fell into step beside me. He was all limbs and amiableness. ‘I don’t mind walking with you, Miss.’

The boy matched my sense of escape. He was on that cusp between childhood and manhood. He was aged perhaps fifteen and his face had the unsymmetrical structure of a teenage boy whose features were just beginning to settle into the mould of the man he would become. He wasn’t tall. He was perhaps my height and no more, but he had an endearing air of doubtful friendliness; warm and cheerful because it was in his nature to be so, but doubtful because perhaps other people didn’t always welcome it.

A certain sense of this boy’s niceness after that room full of adult complications made me protective but perhaps less tactful than I ought to have been. I remarked, ‘I’m going to answer that telephone. But I’ll be very glad of your company if you can explain to me precisely how it happens that there is so much danger tonight that I must let you escort me about the place, and yet somehow once I’m home I’m supposed to be perfectly happy to send you merrily onwards to your own home alone.’

He wasn’t offended. He told me simply, ‘My home isn’t just downstream from the turbine house Mr Winstone mentioned.’

Ah.

I confessed sheepishly, ‘That’s my cousin’s nearest neighbour. I thought that little brick hovel was somebody’s cottage.’

I made Freddy laugh. ‘Absolutely it is. And did you notice that it comes complete with running water laid on beneath the floorboards? You should be careful who you say that to. The turbine house is a matter for local pride. It gives light to the farmyard and the Manor. And it would give power to the steward’s house too if we had a man in there at the moment. We’re as modern as you like here.’

But not so modern, I thought, that anyone thought to mind the traditional distinction between the luxuries experienced by the land-owner compared to those of his tenants.

Then Freddy added doubtfully, ‘Did you say you were going to answer that? It’s in the Manor. Someone should be there.’

That told me what dwelling had the boldness to possess a telephone in this humble place. Its busy farmyard yawned in the gloom beneath us, where life hummed from every ancient stone and sagging roof, and stables for carthorses nestled against the rear wall of a massive stone barn. Below, the trackway descended into stillness. So did the cobbled surface that curved along the front of the enormous barn and veered left at the corner of another. There was no farmhouse attached to this enclosed run of buildings. There was no reassuring glow from watchful windows to oversee either route. Moths and shadows were the only traffic on this trackway. And the memory of Mrs Abbey’s summoning of ghosts and odd strangers, which to these people was also the correct description for me.

I dithered and spoke before I’d thought. ‘You’d think that Mr Winstone would be able to name this man if he’d ever met him before, wouldn’t you?’

Freddy only said politely, ‘Miss?’

The real worry burst out and it matched the blazing colour that still just touched the sky behind the darkened curve of the opposing valley hillside. I said bitterly, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t hear anything. I must have been at home when it happened. I was outside, sitting on my cousin’s front step. The turbine house would have been just out of sight around the bend of the track and I heard nothing. I must have followed them almost step for step up the hill and yet I saw nothing. There was nothing at all except the endless murmur of that telephone.’

I turned suddenly and chose the lane above the barn. I could hear my old friend that telephone still, but rather less insistently against the muffle of that great stone barn. Now it was a forlorn note of neglect. The farmhands were all going home for the night and not one of them thought he should answer it. I knew why. It was someone else’s job and, besides, after the tension I’d encountered in that room after the mention of the Colonel’s son, I could guess that none of them would dare.

I wondered if Danny might. Only he wasn’t likely to be released from his care of his stepfather for a while yet.

The Manor stood a little aloof from the village. We scurried along the frontage of that vast stone threshing barn and passed its gaping void of a vacant doorway. The cobbled drive rose past the stone barn to nose onto a narrow yard that was lined to our left by another older, rougher barn and on our right by the beginnings of parched garden terraces. No beans or cabbages were tended here. Above all this towered the Manor, a building that thrust up old weathered Cotswold gables all along its western face. Mullioned windows studded three floors and hundreds of tiny diamond panes of glass were each turned crimson by the last glimmer of daylight. It was all at once bleak and the most beautiful house I had ever seen.

A sudden doubt made me ask, ‘Freddy? Where is the doctor’s house?’

Freddy didn’t know I was thinking about that man again. The one who had been supposed to be going to fetch help. The boy told me innocently, ‘They’ve gone to the next village along. A place called Winstone.’ He caught my look. He grinned. ‘Mr Winstone’s kin took the name when they travelled into Somerset sometime around the dawn of the universe and in the time since, nature and work have conspired to carry him back again. Him and Mrs Winstone have been married for nearly twenty years, I think.’

Freddy was also unaware that part of this determination to answer the telephone was the tantalising idea that the Manor might be about to gift me the opportunity to speak to my cousin. I might be able to ask her advice before consigning myself to the silence of a solitary night in her cottage. The invitation was certainly lingering there in the air.

The kitchen door was unlocked in a manner that implied someone ought to be at home. I hallooed as one was meant to upon trespassing into a private house, but then I stepped in and found the light switch. Its garish yellow glare revealed a cavernous void that showed very little sign of regular use. The whole place confirmed Mrs Abbey’s statement that the Colonel was spending his bereavement elsewhere.

It made me say to the boy, ‘Didn’t you say someone still lived here?’

He was looking pale in the harsh electric light. I made him come inside so that I could shut the door before all the summer insects could swarm in after us. This little piece of practicality made him muster the words to reply, ‘The housekeeper.’

His voice was very small. His wide eyes were taking in the clean surfaces and empty stores. The farmyard might not have been as derelict as I had supposed, but here the abandonment was real. It was not, however, so old that dust was yet filming the bare surfaces and still that wonderful beacon of life was justifying our intrusion by persisting shrilly.

I followed its call through to where the high beams of the kitchen dropped into the cooler air of a narrow dining room. The light from the kitchen was strong, but this place was made oppressive by walls of panelled oak. Almost the entire space was occupied by an enormously long and very old banqueting table. I didn’t need my father’s training in the trade to recognise its value. Nor did it require his skill to identify the ancient mechanism for a spit-roast within the equally massive but decrepit fireplace. It too was gloomy in that way that spoke of a livelier past long neglected.

By the time I had proceeded through the turns of an impossibly dispiriting passage, the caller had given up and so had I, nearly. I couldn’t find a light switch and the array of paintings that belonged to the era when young gentlemen took grand tours had swiftly given way to the cold metal of old muskets and gin traps. Then I emerged into the loftier space of a broad Georgian stairwell and here was salvation in the form of an elegant table lamp. The moment it was lit, it felt as if I had stepped out of a museum and into a home. I had been beginning to feel thoroughly unwelcome in a place that preferred to be left alone to sleep and dream of the lingering weight of the son’s death. There was also, predictably enough, a growing sense of unease brought on by the memory of that unlocked door and the realisation that the man who had dropped Mr Winstone almost by my feet might have taken flight this way. The feeling was made worse when I checked the shadows in the passage behind me and realised that Freddy had not followed me here.

That wonderful table lamp saved my ebbing confidence; saved everything. A small stack of letters had been collecting by its side for a matter of a fortnight at most. Here I was in a space where a white plasterwork ceiling hung high above at the level of the attic floor. Glass consumed the entire end wall of the house except for the black rectangle that was reserved for a wide front door. Dusky blues shot across the sky outside and the lamp sent rainbow hues racing after them across the chequerboard marble floor. This place was no monument to mortal decay or the lair of a dangerous man; more the tidy corner where the family ought to have been, only they had lately but temporarily stepped out for a while.

The caller obliged me by trying again and drew me at last to trace the sound through the doorway that stood opposite in the narrow portion of wall at the foot of the stairs. If the entrance hall was welcoming, this room was glorious. A vast and elegant bay window faced full west over gardens and the lip of a drop that plunged away so suddenly into the valley below that it was almost powerful enough for vertigo. This view was at last the peace and glory of the countryside.

I lifted the receiver from the thoroughly modern bakelite telephone, which stood on the expansive desk. I said, ‘Hello, um—’ I scanned about me frantically for something that would help me recall the family name, if I had ever been told it. The oval portrait of an attractive woman in dated clothing on the nearest bookcase was no help at all. With an effort I dredged up an image of the platter of post. ‘— Langton residence?’

‘At last.’ This was the operator. She sounded beyond exasperated as she hastily retreated from the conversation to allow the caller, male, to say tersely, ‘Hello? Hello?’

‘Good evening,’ I replied politely, repeating after a moment, ‘The Langton residence. May I help you?’

‘Where the devil have you been? I’ve been trying for days.’ My politeness was wasted. The man on the other end of the line was clearly intending to make absolutely no concessions for basic civility. He was also, as it turned out, unwilling to leave me room to actually answer him.

I began, ‘Well actually I—’

‘Where’s Mrs Cooke? Why isn’t she there?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know Mrs—’

‘What on earth do we pay you for if you don’t know where she is?’

‘You aren’t actually my employ—’

‘Hang on.’ The voice became muffled as a hand was placed over the mouthpiece. ‘I don’t know, sir. I’m trying to find out, only there’s some dim-witted—’

‘Sorry?’

The voice came back into clarity. ‘Pardon?’

‘Ah,’ I said sweetly, ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were speaking to me there.’ There was a momentary silence. Now that I had his attention, I resumed my idea of crisp orderliness. ‘This is the Langton residence, only I’m afraid no one is here who can take your call. I’m a neighbour, you see, or rather the guest of a neighbour and I only stepped in because the telephone was ringing again. It’s been going all afternoon and I’d have answered it sooner only then there was a bit of a crisis in the village and I’ve only just heard it again now. I thought I’d better come in to answer it anyway. Just in case it was urgent, you understand.’

There was a pause when it dawned on me that I was explaining all this without having the faintest idea who this man was. Then it was proved that I hadn’t really been explaining anything as far as he was concerned. Just as I was about to ask this distant male his name, I heard him say on a faintly wearied note, ‘I’m not entirely sure I do understand, actually, no. Who did you say you were again?’

In the background at his end I heard an older man’s voice adding something pettishly. I ignored it and said, ‘Emily Sutton. I’m staying with my cousin, Miss Jones. At least I’m staying at her house while she’s in h—’

‘Well, Emily, I’m not sure what you—’

This time I interrupted him. Perhaps it was being sworn at, ridiculed and then called ‘Emily’ like some half-trained parlour maid that made me brave. I mean, anyone who was local knew my cousin as the daughter of the old steward, even if they had no reason to know me. And, besides, even at this time when war had done away with all sorts of obsolete social conventions, strangers could still expect to rank enough for a ‘Miss’.

I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t quite catch who you are.’

I was perhaps a shade hostile. It was slowly dawning on me that this man would want something from me. So when he told me he was Colonel Langton’s son I’m afraid I simply said impatiently, ‘You can’t be. He died.’

I think I was imagining this might be some extension of the scene I’d just left by Mr Winstone’s house, or perhaps I was comparing this caller with the sort of chancer who occasionally tried to convince my father that the rare and valuable antique he’d just listed for sale was in fact their long-lost family heirloom and theirs by right. Any moment now, this man would lead me into making a fresh statement about the family just so that he could parrot it back to me later under the guise of genuine knowledge before he set about coercing me into popping some supposedly meaningless family trinket into the post for him.

Only this man did none of it. After the smallest of hesitations, the caller replied calmly, ‘That was my younger brother. The Colonel’s other son.’

And my cousin had feared that a lack of tact would cause misunderstandings.

Through a stomach-gnawing fog of embarrassment, I heard him add, ‘This is Captain Richard Langton.’

‘That’s nice,’ I remarked faintly, while frantically trying to calculate how one addressed a captain. I finally tacked on as an afterthought a vaguely military, ‘Sir.’

‘Thank you. And now that we’ve cleared that up, perhaps we can return to the original question?’

‘Which was?’

‘Where is Mrs Cooke?’

I was coiling and uncoiling the telephone wire about my fingers. I had to stop it before I twisted it into a permanent state of tangle. I told him, ‘I’m afraid I don’t actually know who Mrs Cooke is. The house looks shut up to me; there is no one about and the kitchen doesn’t look particularly well stocked, although admittedly I can only relate the impression I got on my dash through from the garden. As I’ve already said, I only answered the telephone because it’s been ringing all day—’

‘Yes, yes; and you only heard it ringing because you’re visiting your aunt Mrs Jane or something like that. Please don’t let’s go over all that again.’

‘My cousin. Miss Jones of Washbrook.’

‘All right; Miss Jones. But that still doesn’t solve my problem.’

‘Which is?’ I’d been right about one thing at least. He was going to ask something of me.

‘Perhaps you could deliver a message to our driver?’

‘Is it an emergency?’ I don’t quite know what made me ask that. I suppose it was a legacy of the shock of finding Mr Winstone at the end of what had already been a very long day of travelling. I was wary of what fresh demands this place would make of me.

The question certainly puzzled Captain Langton. He said on an odd note, ‘No. It is quite important though, Emily.’

Again the address of the parlour maid or the charwoman. Though probably I deserved it this time. I was after all only here because I hoped to make free with his telephone in order to call my cousin just as soon as he gave me room to do so. Biting my lip, I agreed.

‘Good,’ he said briskly. ‘Could you tell him that he’s to collect my father from the solicitor’s office in Cirencester at eleven o’clock on Thursday? Heavens, that’s tomorrow now. That shows that I’ve spent all week trying to set this up. My father intends to go home for a while to …’ He checked himself. ‘No, those details don’t matter here. What does matter is that he’s met by the car tomorrow. Do you know our driver, Bertie Winstone?’

Oh Lord.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said inadequately. I really hadn’t handled this conversation very well. ‘Mr Winstone has had a bit of an accident. I’m afraid I’ve just left him as he was being whisked off to be patched up by the doctor. I have to tell you that I really don’t think it likely that he’ll be fit to drive your car tomorrow. Or any car, for that matter. I really am very sorry.’

‘You’ll have to speak up. There’s an almighty racket going on here. Did you say Bertie has had an accident?’ The man was hard for me to hear too. A persistent drone in the background was blurring his voice.

I told him what had met me during the course of climbing the hill to answer his call; that is to say, I gave him the bare facts about the whole neighbourhood being deserted all day, about finding Mr Winstone, the lucky timing of Danny Hannis coming home, the likelihood that the attack had taken place at the turbine house and, finally, I don’t know why, that I had met several of my cousin’s friends, including Mrs Abbey. I believe I might even have mentioned something about the loneliness that had inspired my walk up the hill in the first place. Apart from that, it was, I realised, the first time I had willingly given Mr Winstone’s injuries the title they deserved and called this thing an attack and not an accident. It was a peculiar kind of shock and yet somehow it lessened it to be telling this man and the Captain certainly took the information very matter-of-factly. I suppose as a military man such things might seem more commonplace and as a son he was certainly inclined to be more concerned with the news that his father was going to be beset by yet more inconvenience.

He was asking me, ‘Is it still working, though? The turbine, I mean. The house still has electricity?’

‘I’ll have to check.’ I presumed he was wondering if the house was even fit for his father to inhabit. He was very practical, this Captain. Whereas I think his orderly mind flustered mine, or perhaps he just made me conscious of the way the evening’s shocks had shaken me. I finally realised what I’d said and corrected myself in a rush. ‘No, I won’t need to check, sorry. I switched on the light in the kitchen when I came in. So, yes, the house still has electricity. But won’t that be from the batteries anyway?’

I was gabbling, confusing myself, but it didn’t matter anyway because he was saying something else and then I was distracted by the sight of Danny’s dog dashing by on his own business, past the window. He had obviously been left behind after that last ruckus in the car. I saw now that another small village clustered on the opposing hillside. The cottages were distinguishable by the yellow smear of oil light in their windows. To their right, another single streak of colour was shining lonely above the straggling woodland that trailed upstream from the unseen hollow where my cousin’s cottage stood. Apart from these few specks of life, the valley was solemnly left to the trees. Proving the point, an owl hooted from one near by. It made me realise that the Captain was still waiting for me to answer his last question.

‘Yes, sorry,’ I added hastily, then I realised I didn’t actually know what I was supposed to be answering. ‘Pardon?’

‘I was just saying that Bertie was lucky that you happened by. I should have guessed myself that no one would be on hand to answer my call if the housekeeper wasn’t home. The few village men will have been up in the fields, and the women and children too for that matter. They’re starting to gather the barley, I believe, and you should know I say that with all the confidence of one who hasn’t the faintest idea about the timing of these things. It was all still laid to sheep pasture when I last lived at home. Did you say Mrs Abbey was there too?’

My hand was fiddling with a pencil now since I wouldn’t let it toy with the telephone wire. I had to bend beneath the desk to retrieve it when the pencil rattled to the floor. I asked, ‘You know her?’

‘I should do. I’ve written her enough letters over the past few months. She’s one of our many tenants, or at least she is when she pays. We allow her a little grace because of her husband. It must have been a shock, discovering Bertie like that.’

I was busily thinking that Mrs Abbey hadn’t spoken terribly nicely of his father for one who owed him a debt of gratitude. I said, ‘I expect it was, but it hasn’t really sunk in yet. It didn’t really happen to her anyway, if you know what I mean. She only arrived later as a spare part to Mrs Winstone’s return.’

‘Actually,’ remarked the Captain mildly, ‘I believe I was meaning you there.’

It was then that the caller proved that he hadn’t been as insensitive as I’d thought to the strain of my evening. He’d simply been calming about it for my sake, and perhaps because he was practical and limited by being on the other end of a telephone.

‘But anyway,’ the Captain added, then his attention strayed as the noise increased on his end of the line, like when a door is opened and the bustle from outside briefly rushes in. With equal suddenness, his attention returned to me. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. My father’s train is about to be called.’

‘Is that Paddington?’ Abruptly the sounds clarified to be those of a busy station. I ought to have recognised them, having departed from the same London terminus myself that morning.

The Captain was saying rapidly, ‘My father is staying in a hotel tonight and he’ll get a car from there in the morning. He can do anything that needs doing for Bertie tomorrow. Lord knows what my father will do for his lunch, but I suppose that’s minor in the general scheme of things and will simply have to be added to the list of things he’ll address when he gets there.’

‘And what about Mrs Cooke?’

He understood in an instant. ‘If you’re feeling brave, feel free to have a quick look about and raise a hue and cry if you find anything awry. I’ll give you the name of my father’s hotel, just in case.’ He gave it to me and I had to jot it down on the corner of the desk’s large sheet of blotting paper. ‘But,’ the voice in my ear continued, ‘I shouldn’t worry. You said it yourself, the kitchen is bare. She’s probably just gone off to visit friends and hoped we wouldn’t notice. And if she hasn’t, well, my father will be back tomorrow. Either way, try not to worry. I hardly think this is anything you need to worry about.’

‘Nothing to worry about at all,’ I remarked more dryly than I intended. ‘Except what your father would say if someone wasn’t going to the shop to get his lunch.’

He laughed. It came as something of a surprise after an evening of serious tones. Then he thanked me and said, ‘I suppose you could consider it a temporary employment? Will you do that? We can put your fee on account.’

In the background I could hear the noise of that train station again. In a very odd way, I didn’t want him to go. I suppose it was because this man was like a little touch of the familiar and the end of this conversation would leave me alone with my thoughts and the task of summoning them all in an effort to explain all this to my cousin. Embarrassingly, I thought he sensed it because he said rather distractedly as the sound behind him intensified, ‘Listen, if it will make you feel more easy, we’ll speak further about all this tomorrow, if I can manage to find the time. And by the way,’ his attention briefly fixed on me again before he went to help his father find his train. ‘I’m sorry I was rude to you. You can put that on account too.’

Then, having stunned me with his sudden apology, which left no room for reply as he moved to end the call and I prepared to rest my own receiver on the cradle, I heard his distant voice add an urgent, ‘Hello? Emily, are you still there?’

‘Yes?’

‘I should have asked. Did you get Bertie to a doctor?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mentioned it just now. As I left he was being parcelled off there by his son and—’ I was interrupted by the surprise of Freddy appearing in the doorway and switching on the light. After the easy gloom of nightfall, it was blinding.

Oblivious to the way my eyes were stinging, the voice by my ear prompted impatiently, ‘And who? Quickly please.’

‘Mr Croft.’ I said it thoughtlessly. Then I remembered Mrs Abbey’s barbs and realised what I might have done. Impulsively I added, ‘I’m sorry, Captain.’

But the apology wasn’t really for the sake of the sharp exclamation that was transmitted down the telephone wire only to be followed curtly by something like: ‘Why on earth …? Oh hell, I really have to go. I wish … Thank you for this, I think … but really, of all the people … Why on earth did you have to involve him?’

As I say, it wasn’t the strength of the Captain’s oath that shook all thought of disappearing housekeepers and injured old men and even my plan of telephoning my cousin from my head. It was the way the garish light had revealed that all the Captain’s sentiments had appeared first on Freddy’s face; and had intensified there just as soon as the boy guessed who was on the other end of the line.

Chapter 5

Freddy’s face regained colour almost the moment we stepped back outside into the warm evening and I was relieved to see it. There was no question now of dithering to telephone my cousin in the hope that she’d suggest I gave up the cottage and instead take a room in a hotel near her in Gloucester, nor did I spare much thought for worrying about strangers or the whereabouts of Mrs Cooke. This was more vital; this was my responsibility because I had brought him here.

The sense of it lurked in knowing that the time I had spent seeking that telephone was the time that had preyed on Freddy’s nerves until he had finally grown desperate enough to come inside to find me. His decision must have been prompted by a premonition of something very terrible indeed. I knew it had because the release as we left by that kitchen door shone in the flush that burned the boy’s cheeks. This was a kind of bravery that hurt. It was all wrong that such a kind, harmless youth like this boy should have ever known fear enough to think it necessary to overcome the memory of it in this moment for the sake of me.

I could see now that my cousin’s description of a wintery incident with the Colonel’s younger son had misled me. Her letter had led me to imagine something along the lines of an over-bred buffoon caught up in a tragic accident involving the March bad weather. The winter had been a chaos of deep snows and extreme freezes but, all that aside, several things were now very clear to me. The first was that the fracas in March was no more an accident than Mr Winstone’s collapse on his path. The second was that while my cousin had at least hinted that the chill of last winter had left its mark on the whole community, it had taken their reaction to Mrs Abbey’s mistake to make me realise the shadow of what had befallen still lived in this place. For Freddy, it dwelt in that house if not in that beautiful room with the bay window. And now there was a chance that the family was set to be brought back into his sphere again and a trace of the dread that haunted Freddy was even detectable in a grown man like the Captain. In the man it took a different form, but all the same, even in the Captain’s voice I thought there had been a glimpse of something that came strangely close to fear.

I could hear it in the boy’s voice now when he asked above the creak of the valley gate as it was opened and pressed shut, ‘They’re coming back then?’

‘They are,’ I confirmed gently. ‘Or rather, the Colonel is.’

I took Freddy swiftly onwards down the hill because I didn’t know what else to do. True twilight had descended in the time that we had been indoors and the hillside was a picture of warm summer tranquillity. I eyed my companion carefully as we neared the valley bottom. His face was angular in this light; sharp beneath unruly hair. He didn’t seem so much afraid now as resolutely expressionless as we passed beneath the scented dark of the small plantation of pines.

‘Did he say why the Colonel was coming back?’

I noted that Freddy didn’t consider himself one of the Colonel’s subjects. It was left to men like Danny Hannis to pay the squire his due deference. ‘No,’ I said carefully, ‘Captain Langton didn’t say why. He didn’t have much time because the train was being called. I imagine his father wants to come back and check that the harvest is progressing as it should. I do remember that he said something about the barley.’

‘Oh, is that all?’ He said it in that flat way youths have of dismissing something desperately worrying quite as if it didn’t matter at all. Then he said briskly, ‘They’re taking in a late cut of hay at the moment. The corn’s behind because of the late summer.’ It was said in a rush of an apology because he didn’t like to contradict. Then he asked in an altogether brighter way, ‘Do you think we should go and have a look at it?’

This last question was because we had reached the last turn of the track above the turbine house. The brickwork was rendered in crumbling plaster and it shone white before us against the curling black line of the stream. Now that I knew, this tiny hut really was quite unlike a dwelling. It was also unlike any electricity station that I had ever known. The power stations of London were great smoking beasts with towering black pillars for chimneys. This small brick house straddled a neat platform and water made a faint shushing sound somewhere beneath, where it was released following its racing fall through a pipe from a pond high up by the village. Further downstream I could just make out the broader area of the ford and, a short way beyond that, the end wall of my cousin’s cottage shone grubby silver where the trackway rounded the base of the hillside.

‘We can take a little detour to the turbine house to have a look, if you like.’ My agreement was given doubtfully. Then I perceived the fierce concentration in Freddy’s face and wondered if people persisted in asking him questions, probing what he knew, and it was this little inquisition he was presently bracing himself for rather than any particular concern about our recent trespass in that house. Immediately, I found I would like to examine the turbine house very much. ‘I know it would make me sleep more easily if I knew we’d done our bit to check that poor Mr Winstone has really left no sign behind.’

The change in Freddy’s demeanour was instant. It was, I thought, a reassuring sign that the boy’s life did not appear in general to give him much sense of fear but all the same I expended significantly less effort on looking the part of a valiant sleuth as I followed him over the last of the roughened hillside and worked rather harder at staying alert to signs of life.

There was no one here. The hut’s rotten door was locked. The single metal-framed window with its flaking white paint was securely fastened and nothing could be made out through the filthy glass. Concealed within would, I knew, be the neat little turbine and an array of vast batteries that stored the generated power for future use. It was all wonderfully clean and efficient, and also decidedly exclusive.

My voice sounded loud in the hush of a sleeping valley. ‘Don’t the villagers mind that their houses stay dark while all this awaits someone’s return to the Manor?’

‘Not really. It’s very old. It’s always been like this.’ Freddy seemed surprised by my question, which in turn surprised me. It seemed an odd mixture that he should dislike the Colonel and his family and yet apparently easily accept this. Freddy wasn’t set to be a revolutionary. He was just a boy who was very afraid that the Colonel’s return brought the threat of fresh harm to his tall and caring Matthew Croft.

We were peering for footprints in the baked mud of the bank above the stream. There was nothing there but the neat little hoof prints of thirsty sheep, at least nothing that we could see by starlight. There was nothing here to shake the overriding sense of my own care for this boy. I found that I was saying clumsily, ‘Mr Croft didn’t kill him, did he? Didn’t cause the son’s death, I mean?’

I shouldn’t have said it. I had only meant to establish the limit of the bad feeling between the Langton family and the other man before adding something reassuring, but the boy beside me, naturally enough, completely misunderstood my intentions. He was suddenly very ready to be angry.

‘No! Of course not.’ He stood there glowering at me in the night, hands balled into fists by his sides and hair all dishevelled again. This really was something that he was asked all too often. It also, I think, cut far too close to a memory of a near loss of his own.

‘Well then,’ I persevered gently. ‘I really think you needn’t worry any more. From the way Captain Langton reacted when I mentioned Mr Croft by name, it seems to me that the family is just as desperately keen to avoid an encounter with that past as you are. You mustn’t think the Colonel means to create a fuss by coming back, or that his return is designed to bring fresh upset for Mr Croft. Captain Langton was …’ I searched for a sensible way to put it. ‘Well, to be brutally honest, he sounded like a normal human being who’d had a bit of a shock when I mentioned that Mr Croft was helping Mr Winstone. You can believe me, Freddy. Really you can. So don’t be afraid for Mr Croft any more, Freddy, please.’

The boy blinked. I’d surprised him. He hadn’t expected my only objective to be plain reassurance. But he did, I saw with relief, understand it. For a moment, his fierceness had made him seem suddenly very young indeed. Then he abruptly relaxed.

Shyly, like a guilty child after a fit of the rages, he gulped and said quietly, ‘You’re very nice, Miss.’

‘Not really. It’s just the truth.’

‘You hope,’ he retorted, but he was only contradicting me for the sake of form. Then he abruptly abandoned the search of the riverbed and led the way across rough ground towards my cottage.

A drowsy bird twittered in one of the taller trees. It set off a cock pheasant, who set off another, and so on until the warning cry barrelled up and down the valley in a relay from one tree to the next. There were an awful lot of pheasants up there. Their voices mapped the twists and turns of the valley far beyond the point where it curved away into the smothering oblivion of darkness.

It made me think again that I really ought to walk Freddy home. I said as much and he sniggered with that boyish confidence that never fails to charm. ‘It would pose a bit of a problem though, wouldn’t it, Miss? We’d be up all night walking each other back and forth.’

We were at my garden gate. I set a hand on the weathered wood and tipped my head thoughtfully at him. ‘You don’t seem very nervous.’

I saw him shrug with hands in pockets. His attention was on a pebble he was turning underfoot. Tangled hair was falling over his brow as he said, ‘You said yourself that the fellow brought Mr Winstone home before he met you and bolted. There’s not much point in being afraid of a man like that. He probably didn’t mean to hurt Mr Winstone anyway. He’s probably just a vagrant who came back from the war a bit strange and Mr Winstone caught him unawares.’

‘You think it was one of Mrs Abbey’s squatters?’

The boy’s gaze lifted. ‘Well,’ he said simply. ‘No one who knows Mr Winstone would do it, so it must have been. Goodnight, Miss.’

And on that practical piece of reasoning, he left me and loped complacently off into the gloom. I walked rather less energetically into my cousin’s house and bolted the door. It was, I thought, one thing to be giving reassurance to a frightened youth about the way Captain Langton had spoken of Matthew Croft, but it didn’t do much for my own worries about letting the boy go. Responsibility always did take the form in me of a vivid awareness of the present set against all the things I should have done before but hadn’t. It was complicated marriage between duty and an enduring feeling of guilt that stemmed from all those childhood moments that had long passed and the knowledge that there would never again be a chance to repay what I owed to those people, so I’d better act well now.

But committed as I was to the idea of playing a fuller part these days, it must be said that helplessness was sometimes still preferable to the occasional experience I have had of the other end of the spectrum; the sheer chill of sometimes acting calmly where care and duty had united to override every other serious principle. Those were the moments that brought me into an acquaintance with the dark things in this world that I would otherwise have quite cheerfully ignored, and I hated them.

They made me wish I could run away. They saddened me. The idea that this life was placing me in the company of conflict filled me with a sense of hopelessness for the future and an urge to seek peace elsewhere. It was the principal motive for this visit to my cousin’s house, after all. Only now I had the memory of the other responsibility that had met me today; the one that had led me to pick up an old man from his path and brought me into an encounter with the long list of other worries that went with this place. So at this moment I was contemplating leaving this place again tomorrow and walking the two miles to the bus stop with a view to riding into Gloucester and joining my cousin, as if peace might be found there instead.

The single thing that checked me was my other fear; the one where I am afraid I will discover a few years from now that instead of finding the tranquillity I crave, I’ve actually developed a terrible habit of dramatising the more ordinary parts of life and fleeing from them for absolutely no good reason at all. So really I had no intention of going anywhere.

Except, of course, to bed and the hope that tomorrow would be an easier day.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, I also have a habit of falling into naïve optimism, and in this instance the lesson came in the form of a light knock upon the front door at about eleven o’clock as I prepared to go upstairs at last.

My visitor was Mrs Abbey and I’m afraid to say that for a brief childish moment I was tempted to feign deafness and leave her out there. But then maturity or responsibility or pure idle curiosity or whatever it was dictated that I opened the door and let her in.

As first entrances went, hers wasn’t favourable. The first thing she did as she stepped in a slinking manner out of the dark and along the cramped hallway was to eye the proliferation of oriental vases on the narrow shelf that snaked away at head height into the kitchen and remark, ‘I see Miss Jones hasn’t yet brought herself to clear away the old lady’s ugly knickknacks.’

They were very ugly and it was, I realised then, absolutely no wonder that I’d been running a long argument with the past and loneliness tonight. These feelings dwelt here in this house. Each of the rooms in this cottage was consumed by the fuss and clutter of a dead person’s tastes. In the hallway, my aunt’s commemorative plates joined a flight of ducks to soar away up the stairs. In the tiny sitting room, fading cross-stitch samplers competed for space with Victorian day beds and fragments of broderie anglaise. Upstairs, in the room designated to be my bedroom, there was just enough space between the display of thimbles and the miniature hazel hurdles for my suitcase and the bed. I’ve never met anyone before or since who could compete with the scale of Aunt Edna’s commitment to traditional crafts. All the time that I’d been working myself up towards going to bed, I’d struggled to convince myself that her shade wasn’t watching from the collection of shadows on the coat rack. She’d died six months ago and in hospital rather than here, but I wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t the sort to indulge in a spot of haunting all the same.

Suddenly, in an unexpected way, Mrs Abbey’s bluntness made me like her. It made me lead the way down the short step into the kitchen and I should probably explain why my cousin Phyllis wasn’t presently in it herself. The explanation for her sudden trip to the city of Gloucester had been left for me on the front step in the form of a note dated yesterday with instructions on where to find the key. Cousin Phyllis was trapped in hospital by the inconvenience – her words not mine – of a broken wrist. A friend of hers had scrawled a postscript upon the envelope with the information that the doctor was intending to keep Phyllis for a day or two yet and that this friend would drop by at some point to see that I was managing.

I thought for a moment that Mrs Abbey was the author of this postscript and that was why she was here. I even had the horrible suspicion that this woman was actually here now to break the news that my cousin’s bicycle accident hadn’t been an accident at all, and I had to add another act of violence to the day’s tally.

But she didn’t. She had nothing to say on the subject at all. She was far too busy proving that she was at least a little bit of a genuine gossip because she was enjoying the horror of the attack on Mr Winstone and the inconvenience of Eddington being half a mile on from here and the irritation that certain self-important gentlemen didn’t consider it necessary to drop a woman home.

‘Did you help them ferry Mr Winstone to the doctor after all?’ My bewilderment wasn’t easy to hide.

Eyebrows lifted. In the greasy light of the oil lamp on my cousin’s kitchen table, her hair looked more frayed about the edges than it had been before. The yellow glow was casting her cheekbones into strong relief and it made the shadows under her eyes stronger. She looked tired. But no weariness could affect her presence. She was, as I have said, rather tall and immaculately clad in a navy skirt and jacket, and she had a jaw that implied considerable strength of will and carried its own kind of beauty. There was, I’d noticed, something about the confidence of women of that age – all over thirty – who knew these days exactly what they were capable of and wore it as easily as a dash of lipstick.

Mrs Abbey’s mouth only formed a little smirk as she conceded, ‘If I’d gone with them on their little jolly to see the doctor, they’d have insisted on driving me straight home and I’d have been safely tucked up under the sheets by now instead of bothering you on your doorstep. No, the truth is I’m here because it’s getting horribly late and it’s still a long way home and I’ve done something rather foolish.’

The smirk eased to show a brief gleam of teeth.

I repeated blankly, ‘Foolish?’

She leaned in to confide dramatically, ‘I went to where it had happened and to see if this vagrant had left any signs behind.’

Ah. She wanted to discuss her squatters again. I disarmed her as best I could. ‘It’s not foolish at all. Freddy and I did exactly the same thing. Would you like a cup of tea?’

It was only after I made the offer that I remembered that my cousin’s kitchen was like Mrs Winstone’s house. Here too we were dependent on an ancient cast-iron range for any cooking. My parents’ home in Putney had running water, gas and electricity laid on. This kitchen had a big stone sink without taps, a tiny window that looked out onto the privy and the single luxury of a full jug of water on the sideboard waiting to be used. Unfortunately, I hadn’t lit the beast of a range yet and it was going to require a minor war to get it going. Then Mrs Abbey chose that moment to break the latest shocking news of the evening. She actually laughed at my offer and said, ‘No tea for me, thank you. I know where you get your water.’ Then, seeing my face, added, ‘You did know it came from the stream, didn’t you?’

I’d been drinking from that jug all afternoon. While I was hastily resolving to boil the water very thoroughly from now on, Mrs Abbey drew out a seat at my cousin’s tiny table.

The kitchen was whitewashed on both walls and ceiling and the clean austerity of the room was a direct contradiction of the clutter that swamped the rest of the house. I moved to the sideboard and propped myself there. Now that I’d let this woman into my home and gone through the brief flutter of companionship I had time to wonder why she was here at all. I prepared to let the silence stretch. I was beaten by Mrs Abbey’s sly sideways look and murmur of, ‘How did you get along with Freddy?’

Her manner puzzled me. It was the sort of tone a woman might use while probing an illicit liaison, only this boy was barely fifteen. I said helplessly, ‘He seems very nice.’

‘Didn’t you find him a little simple, poor boy?’

This was what she was probing. ‘No.’

‘I suppose you didn’t know him before, did you? That’s one thing that can be said for Matthew Croft, he’s certainly improved the boy.’

‘Mr Croft isn’t his father, is he? I mean, he’s not Freddy Croft?’

This question amused her. She laughed. ‘He certainly isn’t. Matthew married Mrs Croft in the spring. Or Eleanor Phillips, as was, I should say. And she isn’t his mother either.’

I conveyed my enquiry with a look. The name was not one that had made its way into my cousin’s letters. Which, to be frank, meant my cousin liked her.

Mrs Abbey added cheerfully, ‘Her farm is the one just up the lane from the village. You’ll see her out and about exercising her horses. Or, at least, usually you do but I haven’t seen her ride for a while. Freddy’s helped her with them since he was evacuated here. He’s from London, like you. Although perhaps not quite like you. His former home is presently a flat piece of ground in one of those cleared spots around the East End.’

‘And is yours?’

‘Pardon?’

‘You, me and Freddy; we’re all from London. It’s starting to feel more like home by the minute.’

Mrs Abbey looked askance at my comment. It made me realise what it was about this visit that felt slightly out of kilter with my expectations. She wasn’t here for tea. She wasn’t really here as my cousin’s friend and she certainly wasn’t quite succeeding at becoming mine. That was the point, I realised. The problem here wasn’t so much that I didn’t think that I would like her but that I felt she wasn’t quite letting me know her. I might have decided that I thought she was wrong for sifting through so many subjects just as soon as she entered the house but they were all shifting so rapidly from genuine humour into sharp edges that I still couldn’t say that even these rather harder gossipy kind of comments were truly giving me a clear measure of who she was.

Actually, there were two things I could tell. The first was that she didn’t have a very nice way of repaying the way everyone tended to be kind to her. And they did it without seeming to like her very much either.

I also could tell that she was only prepared to allow a discussion on her old life amongst the barrow boys of the London East End in that it gave her a chance to return to a discussion of those squatters.

‘Sweet of you, Emily, dear,’ she remarked with the crisp elocution that comes from superior schooling at an early age, ‘to imply that I rank amongst the Freddys of this world as an evacuee but actually my old home was levelled years ago for a new gas works. But if it’s Londoners you want, you’ll find this place feels even more like home soon. There’s a whole bunch of émigrés in a camp a mile or two away at the old air-raid look-out station on the Gloucester road.’

Her little conversational turn was so neatly done it made me smile. I understood at last why she’d been so keen to talk about Freddy. His origin would have brought us to this point if my comment about hers hadn’t.

I was standing with my back to the cast-iron stove leaning against the rail that dried the dishcloth. Mrs Abbey’s attention didn’t enjoy the subject of the squatters for long. Her mouth was already running on to fresh sympathies for the old Colonel and his prolonged absence which had allowed the squatters to arrive unchecked. At least, I thought she meant to seem sympathetic. What she actually said was, ‘Silly old coward. The whole family knows how to make a mess of things, so I suppose we shouldn’t expect them to step into the breach about this. I suppose your cousin told you about young Master John Langton’s antics and passed them off as if they were just a little misstep?’

I stilled against my prop of old metal while she added a shade sourly, ‘Everyone does it. It’s a great conspiracy of silence out of respect for the old man, but I can tell you that nothing the son did should ever be classed as forgettable. They have no right to do it to him. Master John was unreasonable, beautiful, vibrant and terrible and he gambled everything, including his life here, as if they were just counters to be won and lost. At the end, those fearsomely blue eyes—’

‘Mrs Abbey, don’t.’ The plea was sudden but forceful. The way that her voice dwelt on the man’s nature was almost like a caress.

My urgent interjection came as she drew breath to start telling me about how John Langton had died. Only I already knew how he’d died. He died like anyone does losing a game they had intended to win. Unwillingly.

She persisted, ‘Didn’t you say tonight that the man you saw was tall and dark?’

Now Freddy’s white face was in my mind, and the way the Captain had sounded when I had unwittingly dredged up the memory for him. When I didn’t manage to formulate a reply, she added it for me. Musingly, seriously, she added, ‘Yes. Yes, you did. When you were telling Mrs Winstone that you’d seen him on the path you said that he was wearing summer clothes that were too good to belong to a farmhand, that he had black hair and was tall. Lean, was it?’ This was as I corrected her. ‘Well that’s just another way of saying tall, isn’t it? And if he should have happened to have a limp …?’

‘I—’

She was sitting there with her hands spread on the table. It was the sort of manner a person contrives when they think they’re being very daring and I didn’t like it. I suppose I was easily spooked tonight. Her mistake in Mr Winstone’s house had sent all sorts of shadows racing about the room and Aunt Edna’s slightly mad collection had accompanied me all evening. I certainly didn’t need Mrs Abbey to begin conjuring the dead man’s shade from the corners again now.

I told her more clearly, ‘I don’t want to know about it. Don’t you think it might be time for bed?’

She didn’t take the hint. She told me with relish, ‘Master John had a physical weakness in one leg. He took a riding accident in his youth and his body never quite allowed him to forget it. Its waxing and waning was a barometer of his darkest moods.’

I think she could tell I was about to protest rather more precisely. She turned her eyes to an ugly vase on the high shelf before she said with a different kind of eagerness, ‘Of course, if you’re about to tell me that the man on Mr Winstone’s path today didn’t have a limp and piercing blue eyes—’

‘You think I remember the colour of his eyes?’

‘— There is someone else who matches that description, who didn’t die last March. Someone who is also tall and capable and to whom, for all they say he was innocent, everyone was happy to attribute all manner of violent tendencies until young Master John’s death put it clear out of their minds …’

Her gaze returned to me. It actually made me laugh. ‘Mrs Abbey, if you mean to hint at Matthew Croft, I have to tell you I think you’d do better to stick to the version that blames the squatters. There must be someone amongst them who matches your description of tall and dark with blue eyes.’

For a moment I thought my tone had shocked her. Then I realised that she was just amused by my tart adoption of her idea of Mr Winstone’s attacker. It didn’t really matter what I said I thought he looked like. She knew what I’d told them at the village.

With rather more frankness and rather less play at scandal, she asked me with a coolness that was the most authentic curiosity I’d had from her, ‘When you were with Freddy just now, did you see anything? Find anything he’ll feel obliged to tell the others?’

Oddly enough I appreciated the honesty of this open question. She wanted to know what we had found because if Freddy lived with Matthew Croft and Freddy told him that we’d searched the spot, she knew perfectly well that the information would not be returned to her. The exclusion almost explained her visit here, except that this might have just as easily waited until the morning.

I told her the truth. ‘We tried to look about but it was dark and more than a little unnerving. We didn’t find any great clues, if that’s what you’re asking.’

Mrs Abbey wasn’t smiling in the lamplight. This was the real woman and she was deeply alert for something. I could feel its energy emanating from her; building in hard waves ready to break. The thought came unbidden – ready to break like anger.

‘Mrs Abbey,’ I began tentatively, ‘Why don’t you like Mr Croft?’

Her gaze flickered and cooled to a wry smile. ‘I wasn’t very tactful earlier, was I? That man … well, that man is everything John Langton can’t be. He’s alive and he’s frustratingly reserved. He won’t talk about what happened, regardless of how I ask – and don’t look like you think I’m only probing for the sake of gossip because, believe me, I knew young Master John and of all the ways we could manage what went wrong, this conspiracy of silence so that we never dare to even speak his name is the worst kind of healing. There isn’t even a grave where we can lay his ghost to rest—’ Something passed across her face like a settling of control. Afterwards, her words were steadier and less inclined towards revelation. I still wasn’t allowed to know her. ‘And to crown it all, that man refuses to buy my old car that’s mouldering in my barn.’

Her mouth plucked into amusement. I mustered a vague smile in return as I was meant to. Then she asked in her own version of my earlier hesitancy, ‘Emily, dear, tell me the truth. Did you really see as little as you declared earlier? Or are you just displaying the practical city-dweller’s approach to a drama and walking swiftly by on the other side of the street?’

‘Do you mean to ask if I’m minding my business in case someone minds it for me? What do you think?’

Mrs Abbey hadn’t meant to offend. At least, I presumed not. She said benignly, ‘I think it’s very unfortunate that poor Mr Winstone can’t remember the man’s face …’

‘… Since that just leaves my description and I barely saw him at all.’ I finished the point for her. Foolish honesty made me add, ‘Although, I should say that I think I’d recognise him if I saw him again.’

I didn’t expect Mrs Abbey’s demeanour to transform to decisiveness quite so abruptly, but it did, all the same. The change might almost have been with relief. This feeling was certainly running high. She was suddenly dragging out a wristwatch on a broken strap from a pocket. I suppose it mattered to know that I knew enough that this man might be identified and caught; in a strange way I suppose it promised safety even if this night had to be got through first. And that in itself was a clue to her real purpose here, because then she was telling me about the footpath to her little farmhouse and doing one of those funny twists people do when they mean to point out its location only to find themselves waving a hand at the impenetrable screen of a wall. This was the reason why she was here. At last I understood that she wanted to feel in control and at last I was allowed to know the reason for all this odd circular conversation that she patently didn’t really enjoy. She’d given herself a fright at the turbine house and couldn’t quite bring herself to face the long walk up a darkened path to her farmhouse alone.

‘You could stay,’ I offered doubtfully. ‘Unless your hus—someone will be out looking for you?’ I’d almost said husband then and saw from the way she jumped that I’d cut rather too close to that deeply private pain. For a moment she stared at me with that vacancy of expression that a person gets when they’ve been tested unexpectedly on an unhealed wound.

Then the moment passed and she was saying with elegant amusement that was also very genuine, ‘What, will you make room for me amongst all the Welsh love-spoons? No, I’ve got to get back. It’s practically neglect as it is and if I hadn’t been foolish enough to meet with Mrs Winstone by the shop I’d have been home hours ago. The path from the ford is very overgrown—’

‘Let me just fetch a jacket,’ I interrupted, ‘and a torch.’

I stood up from my lean against the stove. Mrs Abbey’s eyes followed the movement. In the lamplight, her face was wan. ‘As easy as that? You’re coming with me?’ Her voice was odd. Shaken would be the best term I had for it, as though guilt strode in on the heels of getting what she wanted.

I pressed my lips into a hapless line. After all those musings on responsibility, this particular question didn’t even require debate. There were some things that you would agree to do without forcing a person to ask first.

I moved past her into the hallway. She rose to follow me and seeing her afresh in a different light I was startled to perceive the faint sheen of moisture on her skin. There was an energy to her movement that had nothing to do with her endlessly shifting humour. She had that look of exhaustion where she was growing so tired of her lot that she was coming out the other side. She was very glad I’d offered to come with her. It hadn’t been temper before. I’d mistaken it. This energy came from the unpleasantness of being horribly spooked by her night-time prowling and the release of finally admitting it.

I found the torch as I struggled into my shoes. It was jammed inside a large and genuine Grecian urn that stood beside the elephant’s foot umbrella stand in the hall. The umbrella stand was inevitably a mark of the old lady’s taste, but the urn might just have been my cousin’s. Phyllis’s war had been a rather different experience from mine.

Having lingered silently beside me for the past five minutes while I searched, Mrs Abbey abruptly spied a different object of interest. My suitcase was standing at the foot of the stairs where I had left it many hours before. She asked in a curiously strong voice, ‘Have we driven you away?’

I didn’t quite trust myself to reply. It was too complicated. So instead I blew out the last of the lamps and stepped out into the surprisingly well-defined landscape beneath a starlit night in August. My companion took the torch from my hand and waited while I fumbled with the key. It was an enormous thing and I had a vague suspicion my aunt had taken it, lock and door and all, from a church somewhere. I only hoped the church had been a more willing participant in the transaction than the elephant who had supplied the umbrella stand.

The night air seemed to revive Mrs Abbey. I heard the increase in the rate of her breathing while I struggled to turn the key. With the sort of embarrassed haste that, in my experience, is commonly used when one has just found a lost object in one’s own pocket after initiating an extensive communal search, I heard Mrs Abbey say, ‘You know, I don’t really need you to come with me at all. I’m bothering you unnecessarily. I’ll just borrow the torch, if I may, and return it tomorrow if I catch you before you go. Otherwise, I’ll leave it for Miss Jones. Goodnight. I’ll be quite safe, and thank you for the company tonight.’

She left me standing there so swiftly that I didn’t even have time to formulate a protest. Or perhaps I was relieved to believe her and let her go. The garden gate clanged shut and then I briefly saw her shadow as a darker shape against the white streak of the stone track. There was a brief flash from the torch as she found the path beside the ford and then the light was extinguished long before her shape was swallowed by the scrubby woodland at the base of the hill. Wood smoke that wasn’t from my stove hung in a silver mist on the silent valley air. The idea of darkness in this desolate place really took on a very different quality compared to the sooty gloom I had known in Putney.

Closer by, something rustled in the dry stalks of the bean plant behind me. It made me shiver and step back in through that heavy door very rapidly indeed. What, I wondered, had she been so afraid was waiting for her out there that she’d come to find me, only to abruptly change her mind? Because she had been afraid for a while there, I knew she had. It had been the only feeling she had shared, but it had been genuine. And then the feeling had passed for her with a suddenness that had carried its own kind of violence.

I bolted the door and checked all the windows. This house was wonderfully secure. No intruders would be working their way in here except in the same manner as the one who had lately stepped in after knocking on the front door. I shut out her visit like I shut out the night. It was, however, impossible to shut out the overwhelming sense that I had just escaped something, only I didn’t know whether the relief had really been hers.

Chapter 6

This new morning began with company and friendliness, where yesterday had ended with loneliness and worries. The nearby shop – and by nearby I mean at the end of a heating two-mile walk to the bus stop and beyond – stood a few doors down from Mrs Winstone’s hairdresser in a sunken lane with sheep pasture beyond. The most sinister thing I encountered in that busy place while I made the sacrifice of funds and rations for the sake of the Colonel’s lunch was the welcome offered by the shopkeeper and her mildly mildewed husband and the collection of respectable mature ladies who used the shop as a waiting room for the doctor’s house next door. They seemed to take their slice of gossip as a kind of tithe on users of the public telephone.

Which meant in a way that it was perhaps fortunate that I failed to reach my cousin on the ward telephone at the hospital. If I had, I’d have unwittingly filled the assembled ears with enough gossip to keep their mouths working for the next few days at least. Instead, I only got to speak to a nurse, who wouldn’t even confirm that there was a Miss P Jones on the women’s ward at present. The most she would say was that the telephone trolley would be on the ward for the patients’ use at six o’clock this evening and I could try again then, which wasn’t terribly useful since sometime in the course of last night I had discovered the idea of achieving a different and more enjoyable kind of flight in the form of going down to join Phyllis today. It would be typical if it turned out that as I travelled down on the bus to Gloucester, she should be travelling up towards her home.

I’d left my suitcase at the Manor. It would save at least part of this long walk if I decided to make the trip anyway. It was a good job too because I knew I’d never have found the courage to climb back up out of the valley otherwise. The walk back to the village on its own seemed designed for exhaustion. It was hot already and a heat haze was casting mirages amongst the tall masts of the wireless station by that bus stop. Only one car passed me on the long lane and it was fortunate that I had about a mile’s warning before it came into view because, unbelievably, it nearly ran me over. It barrelled down into a dip between farm buildings like a rude black beast of a bull and sent a chip of stone flying up onto my ankle while I politely waited on the verge. Then it vanished around a bend and took the roar of its motor with it.

I thought I’d found it parked in the massive stone barn that flanked the Manor farmyard. No one was in the village again and the farmyard had renewed its camouflage of dereliction. I’d walked that way round to the Colonel’s kitchen door after doing my duty by knocking on Mr Winstone’s door first. He wasn’t there. No one spent their days at home here.

The long black nose of the enormous car was occupying the cusp between light and shade beneath the great gaping threshing doors of the barn. A touch to its bonnet proved that the engine was warm. Movement emerged from the depths within and it was Danny Hannis’s dog. He sauntered out from the left-hand wing of the barn. It was now that I saw that this great building was no longer dedicated to grain processing. Half of the space within was consumed by the unmistakeable profile of a shrouded steam engine. The other bay housed rusting hay rakes and implements and a very expensive modern grey tractor which looked similarly like it had already worked very hard for its keep.

There was no sign of the man but the dog was a curious soul. He supervised me as I abandoned this dark cathedral for farming technology. He was with me when I caught the distant murmur of a voice beyond the turn of the other barn; the older one that sagged beneath the weight of its years and ranged further up the hill to meet the Manor kitchen.

It wasn’t a happy voice. It was a low stutter of ‘m’s, like a moan. My first thought naturally enough was of Mr Winstone. My second was for that missing housekeeper.

There it was again, to my left behind a low door into this second barn. It was a low mumble like an injured soul might make, or a hostage, bound and gagged. It made me grasp another concept of horror. The one where a forgotten woman lay unheeded for days on end.

The cobbled space between house and barn was empty. So were the long terraces of the garden. There was no other sound of life here. Other than the dog, I mean. He was at my heels and the only sound he made was the faint click-click of claws on the cobbled ground.

It was the stuff nightmares are built on. I had to ease open the door into an ancient space. I had to wake to the guilt of knowing I’d meant to look last night for conclusive signs that the housekeeper really had left, only I’d been distracted by the way Freddy had appeared. The door was set on surprisingly well-oiled hinges between ancient walls several feet thick. Within was a long narrow stone-flagged passage that ran like a cave along the painted face of wood-panelled stalls and loose-boxes and pillars that supported a low hayloft. This barn had been a tithe barn in its former life – a vast storeroom for a medieval wealth of grain – but its recent job had been to house the Manor stables and, like the rest of this place, its grandeur stood as a monument to neglect after the loss of the son. A set of heavily bolted carriage doors stood at the far end as a bar to freedom and daylight. All the Manor buildings seemed to have issues with good light. The only light here came from about five unglazed slits spread along the barn’s length and the small open door by my side. Dust hung in the narrow beams of sun-shot air, waiting for a breeze.

Mrs Cooke the housekeeper wasn’t here. No one was, at least no person. The murmur came from a lonely goat living in quiet luxury in the stable that was tucked at the end of the row beneath the steps to the hayloft. I’d never met a goat before. This one had his own lancet window and he was a friendly beast, albeit slightly alarming when his head suddenly appeared at eye height, with his front feet hooked over the stable door. He was also rather too interested in the forgotten parcel of groceries in my hands. I left him with a promise to return later with the scraps.

The dog left me at the kitchen door. Alone again in the dry stillness inside I laid out my collection of salad stuff and wondered just how exactly I expected this meagre fare to do for the squire’s lunch. Then I remembered that the note my cousin’s friend’s had added to her letter had included the name of the woman who would sell me eggs. It seemed that someone lived by day in this place after all. She was tiny and crabbed and the luxurious cluster of eggs she unearthed in a vacant cowshed behind the steward’s house was a far cry from the paltry one egg allowance Putney residents had enjoyed each week provided that they were in stock. Our transaction was also mildly illegal but I was hardly going to complain, particularly when she was kind enough to give me butter and half a loaf of bread for the Colonel’s lunch too.

Phyllis’s letters were always a source of information. Apart from the recent missive that was presently lodged in my suitcase and bore the crucial invitation to visit and directions to her door, I also had the memory of a hundred or so more that spanned the years and had come from various corners of the world. She was, as implied by my father’s use of the unattractive term spinster, an unmarried woman of independent habits. But I didn’t think she entirely warranted the term when she was in fact only thirty-one and, besides, I thought it a terrible way to summarise the contribution made by a woman who belonged to that generation of intellectuals who were recruited immediately in 1939 to lend their expertise to the various specialist branches of the War Office. Phyllis had been called up to do something very interesting with maps; her background was in geography.

My letters to her were the childish musings of a girl penned during the quiet times at the chemists. Phyllis’s bold and witty replies were invariably written from obscure locations made even more obscure by the heavy hand of the censors, until they said only that she was well and that the weather was fair – meaning Scotland, I thought – or bracing – perhaps Shetland – or enjoyably temperate, which I took to mean somewhere hot and therefore foreign. The impressive Grecian vases nestling amongst her mother’s clutter in the hall told their own story about where that might have been.

Unfortunately, I had neither my cousin nor one of her letters to guide me now. I was setting the hardboiled eggs to cool in a fresh pan of cold water – indoor taps in this kitchen, of course, presumably drawing spring water from a delightfully hygienic cistern – when I heard a clunk from the depths of the house. It manifested itself into a clatter from the floor above, followed by the bang of a door slamming at the front of the house. It reverberated along the passage and into the dining room and from there to me in the kitchen. It even made me cast an anxious glance out through the window in case a sudden squall had blown in, which it hadn’t, and then it made me recollect my suitcase left any old how by the kitchen table, as if I were expecting the Colonel to invite me to stay.

I moved to retrieve it and found it wasn’t there. But someone was indeed at the front of the house. Scurrying through the gloom of the dining room and then the passage, I learned that the bang had been a door being flung open. I’d assumed it had been the sound of it blowing shut. The distinction mattered because now I found the weighty front door thrown wide, letting in sunlight and flies, and a man heading up the stairs.

He was a short man in a dark suit and he had a suitcase in his hand. My suitcase.

He was oblivious to me. He seemed intent on marching upwards two steps at a time. There was a car outside, black and ordinary, like a cab the Colonel might have taken from his solicitor’s office. I reached the curving scroll at the foot of the banister as the driver’s foot disappeared out of sight.

I called some form of surprise up at him and set foot upon the stairs, I believe because I thought he was a respectable cab driver taking the passenger’s bags to his room and he had somehow managed to confuse my bags for the Colonel’s and it was my duty to correct the mistake. Only then the nature of the man’s gait changed. Before it had been confident, decisive. Now, at the sound of my voice, he snapped round and charged with a clatter of footfalls back into view again. I heard his breathing. Rapid and light and not very friendly at all. There was a rush and a thump and a lasting impression of the beautiful plasterwork on the ceiling as I reeled for the banister. I thought for a moment he must have launched off the top step and landed on me. Then I thought he must have bolted blind straight past and caught me with the case. Finally I realised he hadn’t done either and had the sudden cringing discovery that the man was beside me.

This space was light. White walls, white plasterwork and blinding sunlit glass. The tan case swung above me at about the height that might batter my head. There was a moment when a hand caught in my hair. Then it let me go with a suddenness that shocked almost as much as the impact had, leaving me to discover pain beneath my arm that would later reveal itself as a vivid bruise and also to taste the unpleasantness of a cut lip where I had bitten it while clutching painfully at the solid support of the wooden rail.

There was a crash below as he charged out through the door and missed his step, to turn an ankle where the stone flags met gravel. Then there was a roar as an engine kicked into life. I twisted there, hanging from my wooden anchor, catching my breath, and watched as a battered black Ford veered unevenly away up the curve of the drive towards the lane. I thought he turned right at the end, downhill.

I did nothing. The only thing I could state and did state later with any confidence was that this imposter’s bald head was most definitely a long way removed from Mr Winstone’s lean attacker.

Chapter 7

It was easy to trace where he had been. He’d allowed himself some time, I think, to search the house before our encounter in the stairwell. The evidence implied he must have been on the point of leaving until some sudden recollection drew him to race back inside with the bang that had brought me scurrying. It occurred to me that perhaps he had left some telltale mark behind, made some error that would allow us to identify him, and that was why he had dashed back in – in a determined effort to retrieve it.

If so, it wasn’t in any of the downstairs rooms. He’d left doors swinging into the little room that opened from the wall beside the little table with the lamp on it – a library – and also the study where the telephone stood. At the swift glance I cast in through the door of each, the shelves of the library were untouched, but perhaps the bottles on the drinks trolley in the study were fewer than they had been. He had, of course, also made a thorough tour of the kitchen and helped himself to my suitcase.

The door of the kitchen was probably how he had got in. I’d bolted the front door firmly as I’d left with Freddy last night and it showed no signs of a forced entry now. I bolted it firmly once more and crept upstairs. I know why I went stealthily, as if I were myself a burglar. It was because the house suddenly felt cold and alien again and I wished I wasn’t here.

Upstairs I found a series of three or more closed doors and a long passage that served as a gallery with a further collection of doors just distinguishable at the far end. It was darker again up here and the whole place smelled of mildew and old polish.

I was being watched. Not by the balding man or any possession of his. There was nothing to indicate he’d even been up here before the moment I caught him on the stairs. Instead, my audience was the row upon row of photographs on the wood-panelled walls. Hard Victorian gazes judged me severely as I passed. The women had sharp noses and the menfolk wore unattractive beards that sat beneath the jaw. Then I was greeted by the woman from the photograph in the study downstairs, this time glamorous in her Great War wedding suit. In the next she was smiling tiredly with black hair and extraordinary deep-set eyes and a very young boy in her lap and a badly concealed bulge around her middle. The same eyes were met in the portrait that followed this tranquil family scene, but this time in a young man. Even in hand-tinted colours in this gloom, the intelligent blue gaze of her teenage son shone out of the shifting features of one who might have been designed for the life of a musician or perhaps an orator. I knew which son this was. The clue was in those eyes and the height which matched Mrs Abbey’s idea of a ghost. He was older in the next and this portrait gave an even stronger sense of the handsome face with a flair for drama, yet here I thought I could perceive a tinge of something colder, sadder. Harder. Perhaps it had been taken after the accident that had lamed him. Even so, even with the slightly defiant challenge of the supple lines of that mouth it would, I thought, have been easy to have liked him.

By contrast, the next photograph showed a different kind of man. He was young, perhaps nineteen or twenty. It came with a peculiar twist of pity that I observed how unexciting this person seemed compared to the brother who had looked so much like their mother. It proved how misleading an impression could be when it was formed purely by hearing a voice on a telephone. The present man must be older. His voice had led me to imagine a man with easy confidence and my mind had countered it by presuming he would turn out to be the sort of officer whose chin retreated into his neck just as his forehead advanced on his hairline. This young man in the photograph was neither. His brother burned; this man was subdued, a level gaze in a blandly unemotional face. He was followed by a sequence that captured the career of his father – a senior military man distinguished by an ever-increasing collection of medals – and I thought I could perceive something of a similarity between the Colonel and his older son, particularly in the set about their mouths. Neither looked like they smiled easily. Above it all I was remembering my complaint about Mrs Abbey and how hard I found it to be certain I knew who and what she really was. I suspected the same rule would apply to this man.

The floorboards at the end of the row creaked. I had drifted down the length of the gallery, to be standing just shy of the black corner where a second, narrower flight of stairs turned out of sight up to the attic floor. That sense of trespass returned violently. It carried the message that at any rate I ought to know precisely who and what the younger brother was. He was dead and the sort that left a terrible memory for his neighbours.

The thought dawned that it was not my job to find the traces left by that imposter. The air up here was not still and settled after his invasion. He was here, brooding and silent, and waiting for me to climb onwards from this unexpected encounter with the images of masters past and present. I whirled and raced for the lifeline of the telephone downstairs and the police station that could be reached through it.

I was woefully unprepared for the sudden tilt of my heart as I reached the stairs and a man emerged from the blaze beaming in through the freshly unbarred front door. His figure took form below, ascending as I prepared to race downwards.

I snatched at the banister rail. Only he wasn’t charging into the attack like a burglar. He was running his hand along the rail himself as if he had every right to be there as he climbed steadily towards me. There was a stick in his other hand. The sight forced my mind to swing violently away from the dread of a renewed confrontation with a returning imposter to a jolt that was altogether less tangible; less easily digested in the light of day. At the heart of his silhouette, I could feel he was watching me. For a second my legs actually carried me down a few more steps, as if I might attempt my own version of the wild leap down the stairs and bolt past him for the door.

Then in the next second my mind sharply observed that my appearance had surprised him just as much as he had surprised me. More than that, I saw that he had noticed my impulse to escape and was instinctively bracing himself to put out that arm to intercept it. It made him real. It made his shape become more solid. My hand tightened on the banister, snatching me to a halt where my feet weren’t quite yet ready to do the job themselves. He stopped too; or rather the instinct that threatened immediate action passed into something less intimidating as he read the manner of my appearance more clearly. And then my eyes adjusted to take in his features.

‘Emily, I presume,’ Captain Richard Langton said from his position about seven or so steps beneath me, and placed himself firmly in the land of the living. ‘Why are you up here?’

Like his portrait on the wall, the Colonel’s older son was unsmiling. Below I heard a mutter from a more aged person who was passing from the stairwell into the passage and onwards towards the kitchen. Outside, beyond the newly opened front door, a man was dragging cases out of the back of a shabby cab and stacking them on the drive.

The Captain’s steady climb reached me and I stepped aside to allow him to retain his grip on the banister. I remembered the sense of pity that had met my examination of his portrait and was disorientated by it. It stole my capacity to speak sensibly. I said in a shaken rush, ‘You’re limping. For a moment I thought—’

Later I would be forever grateful that intelligence briefly put in an appearance and checked the end of that sentence. I had been about to say that for a moment I’d thought he was his brother.

Instead, I found that he was surveying me with the sort of calm scrutiny that scorched. I imagine he saw a silly young woman in a summer frock with a pale face and standing on the stairs in a house where she had no right to be. I saw that he was a good few years older than the young man in his photograph. He didn’t tower over a person as his brother must have done, but was tall enough to have seemed nicely built had it not been for the debilitating distraction of the cane, and I had the slightly embarrassing thought that the voice on the telephone had been an indication of the presence of the real man after all. He wasn’t wearing a uniform. His ordinary single-breasted suit over shirt and tie would have done for any reasonably wealthy man of the day.

So much I grasped as he turned his attention to my question. I heard him say with creditable mildness, ‘I sprained something tangling with an idiot who was running for the same train. It’ll ease off soon enough. What are you doing up here?’

Then, sharper, ‘There’s blood on your ear.’

I put a hand up. My fingertips came away stained with a thin film, like grease. I had been bashed about the head by my case after all. The memory went through me like a bolt. Followed by the memory that I had been on my way to telephone for the police. I found that my eyes must have drifted past him onwards down the stairs at the thought because his head half turned to follow my gaze as if unsure that I wasn’t acknowledging a presence beyond him. There wasn’t anyone there, of course. His gaze slowly returned to me, watching me more closely. I imagine he was wondering if my sudden desire to move onwards was driven by the shame of snooping. I had an overwhelming urge to show him my empty hands, palms uppermost.

Instead I scrubbed away the blood on my fingers and gabbled anxiously, ‘There was a man. In this house. I was preparing your father’s lunch and he was in here. He stole my case. I’d only left it here while I went to the shop. I came through into the stairwell and he ran past me into a car – he’d been looking about the house, I think. He’d been into your library and the study. I came up to see what he’d been doing upstairs. I don’t know who he was. After what happened to Mr Winstone last night I thought, well … I don’t know. He bashed me as he took off and, as I said, he took my case.’ A hesitation before I added nonsensically, ‘It had all my clothes in.’

I had to suddenly reach past him for the banister. Not because I was in any way unequal to the distress but because my words were coming out so quickly that I ran out of breath. I found that his hand had flashed to my elbow to steady me. It was done with the same instinctive reflex that would have formerly intercepted my flight. It meant to save me from tipping head first down the stairs but it hurt too because his walking stick was trapped beneath his hand and my flesh.

Now I really was breathless. He steadied me for a moment and then said, ‘All right now?’

‘Yes. Yes, fine now, thank you.’

He let me go. I stayed propped against that vital solidity of the banister. Then he said in a tone of some doubt, ‘Did you say someone came in here to steal your bag?’

‘My suitcase, actually. It was only left in the kitchen while I went to the shop.’

‘Very well, your case,’ he amended calmly. ‘But why?’

I was calm again myself now. I turned my back against the banister and said plainly, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. He’d been in the library. And that office to the right.’ A waft of my hand. ‘I was about to go in there myself to telephone the police when you arrived.’

I saw something snap in his expression. An indefinable shift in his attention. ‘Show me,’ he said. And suddenly, uniform or no, I really was face to face with a career soldier.

The cane was dropped against the banister and the long coat that had been draped over his arm was hung there above it. There was no sign of the limp now as he went with me down to the white and black chequerboard tiles on the ground floor.

He hesitated when he reached the threshold into the room that housed the telephone. For a moment I thought he was anticipating something that waited for him in the room beyond.

I was seeing the room for the first time as he must; as a person familiar with it must, I mean. There was the same warm sunlit glow and today it cast into relief the pretty feminine décor of a woman’s drawing room that was only superficially supplanted by its later incarnation as a man’s study. This had been his mother’s room and her personal choice of paintings still hung on the wall; two landscapes in unattractive brown. My father would have loved them both. I was more conscious of the masculine touches that overlaid the woman’s tastes. They belonged to the young Master John as Mrs Abbey had called him, and they also belonged to the dread that had flooded Freddy’s face as he had approached this very same threshold last night.

It was the same memory that this was the brother’s domain that checked the man beside me now. But the Captain had better mastery of his feelings than the boy had, where calmness might manage the job better. He only asked me unnecessarily, ‘In here, you say?’

And stepped into the room.

I watched him as he surveyed the untouched surfaces and shelves of this space. I found myself recalling the photographs on the gallery wall and realising that I’d misread him there too. The idea I’d had that he was a cold, bland man beside the insatiable, charming energy of his brother was a lie. I’d read that grey portrait as calm but it was only calm if the manner of the control itself served to prove the energy of the thoughts beneath. I don’t mean to say that he displayed an unhealthy tendency for concealment. In fact, I believe it was the opposite. This was a man who had the intelligence to feel but also to take responsibility for his manners and to govern them, particularly at times like the present when a young woman had surprised him in his house.

Of course the contrast to this was the intimidating idea that instinct might be the force that unchained responsibility for him. It made me wonder if the physical part of his life in soldiering was the moment that measured reason twisted into the freedom of pure reflex. In short, I found myself wondering if he enjoyed the liberation of violence.

It was a bad moment for the Captain to turn and spy me waiting awkwardly on the threshold, fingers toying blindly with the grooved wood that framed the doorway. My mouth began to frame the tentative suggestion that perhaps he should undertake the act that had motivated my flight from the gallery upstairs and it was time to call the police. It would have marked a conclusion to my part here for both of us. Then he caught as I did the crescendo of speech in the passage behind me and beyond the stairwell. The sharp rattle of raised voices in there was accompanied by the unexpected yip as a dog barked.

In a moment he was past me, a hand lightly brushing my sleeve in encouragement to follow, and perhaps reassurance. He met the commotion in the claustrophobic gloom of the passage. I was behind him. We weren’t witnesses to another assault though. At least not one by a human. Danny Hannis was there with a captive white blur wriggling away under his arm. He must have just snatched his dog up after it had been discovered attempting to worry the old man’s ankles. The Colonel was there now beyond him, a bullish head on a short neck, who must have once stood taller than his son. He was the sort of man who in his youth must have strutted about grim-jawed with all the might of his military training, but now he was reduced to being all torso and frail limbs. He seemed to develop a list as he marched along the passage towards us to the point that his shoulder veered helplessly into a line of gin traps. He was brandishing a fist like a prize fighter. I wasn’t quite sure who he was preparing to beat: the dog or the farmhand.

The Captain curbed it all by saying quite cheerfully, ‘Hello, Hannis,’ before adding, ‘Father, do you have to announce your return by battering an estate worker?’

‘Particularly when the estate worker in question only came in to see what Miss Sutton was up to.’ Danny was not, it must be said, particularly cowed by the Colonel’s anger. Perhaps it was a common enough mood that no one here thought to take it seriously.

‘What was she up to?’ I felt the Captain’s gaze switch curiously to my face.

Danny abandoned retreat to tell him quite coolly in a tone that was rather unpleasantly man-to-man, ‘I saw her go nosing into the tithe barn and then here, and then that car dashed off.’

There was something there that uncomfortably gave the suggestion of suspicion. I tried to hide my irritation. The Captain, on the other hand, really did conceal nothing. I felt the readjustment quite plainly as he reconsidered my flight from the gallery upstairs. It made my cheeks flush quickly and hotly since, on the subject of behaving oddly, Danny was rather more guilty than I, given the fact he must have been hiding in the machine barn while his dog had escorted me on my way.

I told Danny, ‘In which case you’ll be interested to know I thought I was looking for Mrs Cooke. Only I found a goat instead. And since we’re talking cars, did you have to nearly run me down in the lane with that beast of a machine?’

I felt my mouth work into silence in a peculiar way as it dawned on me just as soon as I spoke that of course it hadn’t been Danny who had roared along the lane at me. It had almost certainly been the bald-headed imposter arriving to begin his search. I risked a glance at the Captain. He’d guessed it from the change in my expression. That control was in evidence again on his face. This time from the cool turn of his gaze towards me his manner appeared to wish to project itself onto me. Well, as it was, I could appreciate the impulse that might drive a son to shield his ageing father from the shock of learning that his home had been invaded, particularly coming as it did in the wake of a belated return to the site of recent bereavement and the added distress of Mr Winstone’s attack.

I did my best to help. I stood there mutely and let the Captain tell me briskly, ‘Hannis isn’t allowed to drive the car. Something about the nature of his cornering has put my father off. I can’t imagine why.’

The remark made Danny’s grin return briefly in the dark. There was concealment somewhere in there of a different sort that seemed like a conspiracy to avert a different stress for the old man. I thought Danny knew I’d noticed. He added with perfect blandness, as if pre-empting another accusation, ‘And before you ask, it can’t have been Pops behind the wheel just now because the doctor took one look last night and prescribed bed and quiet. So with that in mind, he’s gone into town with Mum on the bus.’

There was no grin this time, but beneath the rough hair, his eyes gleamed. We attempted a general movement towards the light of the stairwell. Only unfortunately, for all the old man’s air of increasing infirmity, the Colonel was still as sharp as a tack.

As he stepped out into the better light of the space beneath the stairs from the peculiar tomb of violent implements that seemed in some way a physical representation of his grief, I saw his face clearly for the first time. In other ranked soldiers I had met, even when dressed in ordinary clothes, their profession had always been distinguishable by the peculiar suppleness around their mouths when they spoke; something like an exaggeration of the movement of the jaw that belonged to men who spent a lot of time in the officer’s mess and got a lot of practice at guffawing. I couldn’t imagine this old soldier had ever guffawed in his life.

His son didn’t look like he belonged to that class either. He certainly wasn’t smiling when his father queried coldly, ‘You saw this man?’

Because I was stupid, I asked blankly, ‘Which man?’

‘Father, this is the young woman who made me run for the train. Miss Sutton.’ Just beyond my right shoulder the Captain’s voice was low and mildly persuasive, as though his father was in danger of bullying me like he did Danny Hannis. For a moment I thought the son was saving me, but when I turned my head I found that although his eyes were a considerably less dramatic shade of hazel compared to his father’s grey, at that moment they shared rather too much of the family intensity for my comfort. There was something odd there; a kind of dismissive impatience when he added, ‘I think, Emily, you said you were about to prepare my father’s lunch?’

Flushing, I said lamely, ‘Why yes, I—’

‘This man who nearly ran you down.’ The Colonel’s interruption was decisive. ‘He was here? At this house? Was it the same fellow who …?’

He meant to ask, of course, if this were the same fellow I had encountered on Mr Winstone’s garden path. Standing by the table with the lamp on it, the old man’s gaze was unwavering. I couldn’t help answering now. I risked a glance at the Captain as I said awkwardly, ‘He wasn’t the same man.’

I caught the moment the son raised his eyes to heaven.

The Colonel was waiting. I could see that he was used to having his orders obeyed. I could also see that his hand was trembling a little where it hung by the polished lip of the table. I said unwillingly, ‘He looked like a city man who had taken a wrong turn off the main road.’ I couldn’t help the stray of my eyes towards the Captain’s own city attire. There was a twitch of enquiry in response to the unintended insult. I added hastily, ‘I mean his suit was grey and he wasn’t terribly tall and he was balding.’

‘Age?’ This was from Danny.

‘About fifty, I think. He had a pappy complexion.’

‘Pappy?’ The Colonel frowned at the term.

‘You know, fleshy but soft, like a shrivelled potato.’

‘You have excellent powers of observation.’ I believe the Captain was mocking me. Little did he know how much I had been privately congratulating myself for learning the lessons of yesterday and managing to commit this man’s features to memory. The Captain asked, ‘And what did he take, do you know?’

He’d asked me this once before. He knew what I would say. ‘Nothing that I know of,’ I said, ‘except my case, of course. He took my suitcase.’

‘Yes, yes,’ the Captain agreed impatiently, ‘and with it, all your clothes. So that when we next see you, I presume you’ll be clad in your aged aunt’s wardrobe, which last saw the light of day in the era of bustles or something like that. Have pity for me while you do it. I wasn’t planning a trip to the country when I dropped Father at the station yesterday and my change of mind came up on me, shall we say, rather abruptly and without leaving time to pack.’

‘You needn’t have come at all,’ remarked the old man tersely while revealing for the first time the first glimmer of the parent beneath. He was fond of his son. That weakness in his hand wasn’t fading though. It suddenly struck me that it was perhaps deliberate that the Captain was keeping us loitering in the lee of the staircase. A few steps more would confront the old man with the open door into the younger son’s study and I thought I knew by now what effect it had. To lay it before the old man like this just as soon as he’d arrived would be an awful welcome.

‘Hold on a minute, Emily.’ I must have moved impulsively to shut it because the Captain put his hand out. I think he thought I was running away. His gesture held me there while he said to his father, ‘Do you want your cane? I’ve taken it upstairs already. Emily? Perhaps you might …?’

Perhaps he’d understood me after all. And perhaps he knew his father well enough to know that it wouldn’t help to let the old man know why we were, in effect, managing his entrance to his own home. I nodded my agreement and turned to slide through the gap between the Captain and the painted triangle that screened the space under the rising stairs. Then the Colonel’s voice addressed me so that I turned again and found myself briefly faced with the panel of glass beneath the stairs that proved to be a historic gun cabinet. Sporting guns from the ages were locked inside, gleaming with oil, and an awful lot of rotten old shooting sticks with deer’s feet for handles.

I was turning again to face the Colonel as he asked, ‘Do I understand correctly that you saw both these men? This fellow today and the man who struck Bertie? Has your stepfather remembered anything useful, by the way?’ This last question was barked at Danny.

Danny shifted the weight of the little dog in his arms – who was now hanging like a deadweight in protest – and said blandly, ‘Not really. To be honest, now the excitement’s worn off and people have stopped fussing over him, the only thing Pop can really remember with any clarity is the sight of Miss Sutton’s face looming over him on the path.’

‘Poor man,’ I sympathised automatically, before I’d thought. But really I was wondering why Danny had said it like that. Why he’d felt compelled to add this little mention of my part in Mr Winstone’s collapse in the manner of an amusing aside and yet I could tell in an instant that it meant something to the Captain. I couldn’t read Danny’s face because his eyes were downcast as he ran his free hand over the dog’s head in an easy caress, but I could read the Captain’s. He was staring at me as though he’d just discovered a lie while he said clearly, for his father’s sake, ‘Well, it doesn’t seem anything important was taken today. Do you want to step outside with Hannis, Father, and give your orders about where to take your many bags?’

And then the impasse was broken by a flurry of movement which bore the old man to the door and outside and the Captain to the study door. He shut it decisively. A hand gripped the handle firmly while his eyes followed the departure of his father and then as soon as he was sure the Colonel was out of earshot, his attention rounded onto me. I was hoping for an easing of tension; a recognition at the very least of our mutual charade. I wasn’t prepared to meet suspicion. And I wasn’t remotely happy to perceive the tone in his voice when he said, ‘What are you doing here, truly? I mean who are you? What is your profession?’

I gaped. The lie he thought he’d discovered was very specifically mine. It made me bluster, ‘I beg your pardon? What have I been doing? I’ve been here talking to you on the telephone, I should think, and running errands, that’s what.’ His head tilted. He expected an answer to each of his questions. I added a shade tartly, ‘I haven’t got a profession. Formerly I was a chemist’s assistant. In Knightsbridge.’

‘And your father? What does he do?’

The rapidity of his hard questions was strangely shocking. It was the unfriendliness of them. I understood that he didn’t know me and might wish to understand better who had been letting herself into his father’s home, but I didn’t know what this particular course of his suspicion meant. I told him, ‘He’s a supplier of antiques to the nobility. Or, at least, he was. He’s trying to retire.’

‘So he’s also a person with a former profession. I see. And this cousin of yours?’

‘Cartographer.’ Surprisingly, this was given by Danny Hannis. We’d both thought – the Captain and I – that Danny was already outside, but there he was, bending on one knee before the front door, dragging a string from his pocket to act as an improvised lead for the dog. Without lifting his head he added, ‘At least, that’s what she is when she’s not being a strange solitary soul living in the shadow of her dead mother.’ Now the head lifted. ‘You know her. She’s the daughter of old Steward Jones. He clipped our ears for poaching fish from his pond and when he died old Mrs Jones retired to the cottage in the valley. That was about the time you last spent a long spell at home … I mean, it was about ten years ago.’

I expected the Captain to soften a little at this laying out of my credentials. But he didn’t. He listened impassively while Danny told me cheerfully, ‘I meant to say. Your cousin’s bicycle was left in my workshop after her accident and she asked me to give it to you. Said it might be useful. It’s outside the kitchen door, leaning against the far wall. She’s set to be let out tomorrow so you can tell her that you got my note and managed to get eggs and milk as directed.’

Then his mouth twitched in a manner that implied either sympathy, solidarity or ridicule before he swiftly escaped outside to receive his orders from the Colonel, leaving me to fight a battle with the Captain that I couldn’t even imagine a need to begin.

I tried to establish a little more clarity as the Captain moved to ease the front door closed. I said reasonably, ‘Don’t you think it’s time we called the police?’ Then I added haplessly in the face of his stare, ‘Isn’t that what one normarily does at a time like this? When one isn’t being whatever it is you suspect me of?’

I actually expected him to smile at that, particularly given the way my brows furrowed in the wake of spotting my own little peculiarity of speech. But it turned out the illusion I’d been suffering that I understood his idea of calm was made of very brittle stuff. I didn’t know this man at all. And didn’t want to. I thought I preferred the sort of soldier who smirked and guffawed.

This man manufactured a stare that made it seem he thought I had run mad. It was a very strange defence. I was helpless as he said, ‘No police.’

I said quickly, ‘I appreciate that you want to protect your father but why are you—?’

I meant to ask why he was systematically belittling the pretty fundamental loss of all my clothes, let alone the seriousness of my account of an invasion into his house, but he interrupted with a very bland question of, ‘Do you understand?’ Then I had to stand there feebly while he pursued his own course. ‘I expect you think I’m overstepping my authority here but, really, you foisted that role upon me when you decided to embroil any passerby who happened to be in the vicinity in the rescue of my father’s driver.’

We were back to unhappy mentions of Matthew Croft again. I whispered his name.

The sunlight through the glass beside the doorframe touched one side of the Captain’s face. It should have softened his features but it didn’t. ‘Spot on,’ he said. ‘Since you got there so swiftly, I imagine you must have already digested every sordid detail of my family’s history with that man, so you cannot be at a loss now to understand why at this moment I’m here when I ought to be in London and why I couldn’t possibly allow you to wreak further havoc in this house. Haven’t you done enough?’

‘I haven’t actually.’

‘What?’

‘Heard the full sordid details.’ That startled him. He’d thought I was finally admitting darker intentions. It seemed he was absolutely failing to understand me too. It was unexpected. This was not a common experience for me. I told him with a greater sense of sympathy for the feeling that was driving him here, ‘Barely anyone has said a word. And besides, I haven’t asked. I have no interest in knowing what happened in that room or what Mr Langton did. And I don’t want to hear any unpleasant insinuations about Mr Croft either.’ I lifted my chin rebelliously, just in case he meant to defy me there. ‘Based solely on my own brief dealings with that man, I have to tell you that I actually quite like him.’

That, suddenly, made the Captain smile. In the midst of his worries about his father, I’d made him laugh. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I suppose I’d better not ask what opinion you’ve been forming about the rest of us.’

It was a concession of sorts. Then he gave a little sigh and tension fled too. A hand lifted to run through dark hair. He said with considerably more gentleness, ‘Look, please try to see what’s happened here from my point of view. I don’t really mean to accuse you of anything. I believe you really have acted in good faith. It’s just that I’ve come here at great inconvenience because of something that was said by a young woman I’ve never met and now she’s announced that we have to add an intruder to the list. If you knew how the past few months have been for my father you’d know just how horribly convenient that sounds.’

A strange chill went through me as his head lifted and he told me frankly, ‘Now, I can’t stop you from reporting the loss of your case to the police, and I certainly will be encouraging Mr Winstone to report his assault. In fact, he’s probably already done it, so I hope you’re ready to give a full and thorough witness statement when our local constable comes knocking. But,’ he added, becoming severe again, ‘be aware that you never had access to this house. Tell them you were robbed outside, tell them it took place anywhere – on the moon if you like. But do not mention this house.’

He continued by making a rough list. ‘Don’t mention your food in the kitchen, the telephone conversation with me in my brother’s study or any of it. Please. I really cannot have the police calling on my father. It’s bad enough that Bertie’s attack loosely connects my father to Matthew Croft. I can’t have it made worse by having this house in an official report. You have no idea of the distress it will cause when it gets out. Which it will inevitably do. Please?’

Now he’d surprised me. I’d expected him to claim my silence with threats. Instead he’d dared to trust that the high significance he placed upon his father’s needs would rank as sufficient justification for overriding mine. In a last show of defiance, I muttered to my shoes, ‘I’ll send you the bill for replacement clothes, shall I? Since I won’t be depending on the law to return them.’

I looked up in time to see a different kind of concentration flicker behind those eyes, followed by perhaps the first instinctive feeling I’d seen him reveal that day and it wasn’t violent at all. There was the smallest glimmer of warmth. I’d obviously just revealed some part of me too. ‘Do that. And Emily?’

‘What?’

‘Did you really say ‘normarily’? You do know it isn’t a word, don’t you?’

‘It’s an accidental contraction of normally and ordinarily,’ I said bravely. This was something that happened whenever I got myself into a position of trying to speak my mind and only ended in entangling myself instead. It irritated me that I’d slipped into doing it now. ‘I can’t help it. You’ve already scored your victory. Do you have to make me feel like a child too?’

I’d like to pretend I managed make a grand exit then and left him staring dumbfounded at my magnificent wake from his place in the stairwell. But instead I glanced back briefly as I reached the passage towards the dining room and, to be honest, there was something awfully humbling about seeing this man wreathed in all that sunshine while his father and a man and a dog bickered cheerfully about luggage behind the glass outside, turning alone to face whatever fresh battle awaited him within the bright, pretty setting of that study.

Chapter 8

I have often wondered if I am the sort of person who tends to make things unnecessarily dramatic with the force of my own emotions. But lately I have tended to believe it is more complicated than that. I think that sometimes it is my better feelings that keep me from making bigger mistakes. I didn’t march back to the bus stop to idle away three hours until the second and final bus of the day came. I didn’t feed the resentment from my ejection from the Manor or use it as an excuse to relieve all the other stresses of the morning either. I’m already a woman who is haunted by the grander wrongs I have encountered in life – there are plenty of real opportunities to feel wretchedly at fault if one only looks for them after all – and I certainly didn’t need to add to the burden by participating in the more immediate idea of tit-for-tat that grows all too often from smaller trespasses upon basic civility.

I suppose the simple truth was that I was haunted enough by things that I couldn’t control, so I certainly didn’t wish to add to the list by including things I could. So instead I shed the lot by feeding a few scraps to the goat as I’d promised, then I wheeled the bicycle gingerly down the hill back to my cousin’s cottage and took the water jug from the cool of the kitchen to find the spot in the stream above the ford where the sheep didn’t spoil the banks.

The hour that followed began with an introduction to yet another man. This one wasn’t balding and wasn’t attacking anyone either. He was robust and friendly and he was interrupted in the act of propping his motorcycle against the verge outside my cousin’s gate as I returned with a brimming jug.

Constable Rathbone accompanied me inside. He was flushed after his race down the track from the other direction – the route that rose from the cottage through dark green trees and a gate onto a lane – and his hair had been swept into chestnut curls around the base of his helmet by the wind. He was here, as the Captain had foreseen, because Mr Winstone had reported his assault early this morning and this proved that it was a good job I’d put off racing for that bus because it really would have been suspicious if the main witness had taken off before she’d even left a name and forwarding address.

The constable sipped my tea and took notes while I recounted a simple statement of what I had found on Mr Winstone’s garden path. The kitchen was an inferno because I’d had to light the stove to boil the kettle and the room was only made bearable by the breeze that was wafting in through the open front door. Through the course of the policeman’s questions I learned that he was a true upholder of the law and by that I mean he gave the impression he might be very efficient at setting-to with whistle and truncheon if he were called to suppress a civil disturbance. I had a suspicion, however – and it was borne out by the fact that he had not yet visited the supposed site of the attack – that when it came to the investigation of a crime, his training only went as far as recording the bare facts of the case ready to hand over the lot to a detective from the county force. I supposed PC Rathbone might prove to be capable of rising to the task of arresting his man if the brute were to be caught in the act of doing something irrefutably guilty. But quite honestly the good Constable Rathbone didn’t give the impression that he had any idea of actually going in hunt of him.

In a way it was fortunate Constable Rathbone wasn’t much of a detective. He had finished his tea and was folding away his notebook and reaching to collect his helmet from the kitchen table when we heard a car roll to a halt on the trackway outside. There was a creak as its springs met a hollow and silence as the engine died. Naturally, I went to look. I was half hopeful that this was a cab bearing my cousin home from the hospital. It wasn’t. The chrome bumper of a black bonnet peeped at me from beyond the screen of the garden gate while I hovered near the mass of coats hanging in the hall. Aunt Edna didn’t seem to be stalking me from amongst them today.

But a real living person was hunting me. The sound of a car door swinging on its hinges travelled through the open front door. It was followed naturally enough by the thump as the car door was shut again, only, instead of hearing next the crush of dry stone underfoot, there was a cough as the engine kicked urgently back into life. The driver had climbed back in again. He made his car perform a quite extraordinary turn in about thirty rapid shuffles back and forth before dashing away again around the bend towards the lane where the gate had been left swinging. It was the black Ford and the swift about-turn had occurred when its bald-headed driver had stepped around the front of his car and found himself being presented with a close view of a policeman’s motorcycle.

I stood there too stunned to really register shock. Quite honestly, it had never occurred to me to think that I was the common theme in this run of oddness rather than the Manor. Only here I was gripping the coarse folds of one of many aged coats, merging with them, really. And thinking that I’d met bombs and war, and wasted years dreading that all the human nastiness that ran like a vein through the whole lot might persist into peacetime, and yet at the same time I’d still happily been convinced that none of it had ever been specifically directed at me. Now, though, this man had apparently taken to calling on my doorstep just as soon as I’d left myself with no real chance of catching any bus anywhere and I was feeling as though this one thing were about to prove that my attempt to find a little perspective here was set to be horribly skewed the wrong way. Where I had meant to assert once and for all that nastiness had no place in my daily life at all, these people appeared determined to prove that it very specifically did.

‘Changed his mind, did he?’ PC Rathbone joined me in the hall, small eyes in a sunburnt face wrinkling comfortably at the now vacant trackway. ‘Oh, no, here he is back again.’

The policeman was oblivious to the fact that this was an entirely different car. I couldn’t quite see its nose well enough to say what make of vehicle it was, but this time the gate was carefully pushed shut and the black bonnet that drew to a halt at the end of my garden contained the unmistakeable might of a very powerful engine. It seemed that I had been partially right to think the Manor owned its share of this strangeness because here was its representative arriving in person at my garden gate. It must be said that the news didn’t exactly come as a relief.

Willpower made me shake off the clawing grasp of musty coats and the proximity of the amiable policeman and step out onto the path. My hands met and gripped the weathered wood of the gate and I waited there while the car creaked and Captain Langton climbed out. I saw him hesitate fractionally as he saw me there, but then he turned to press the car door shut. Unlike the other man, this man didn’t even quiver when he stepped around the nose of his car and his eyes fell upon the policeman’s motorcycle.

His eyebrows lifted a fraction though when I didn’t open the gate for him. Instead I leaned across it with my weight on my hands to tell him in an unfriendly whisper, ‘PC Rathbone is here asking about Mr Winstone’s injury. And did you see the other car?’ I could tell from the brief drift of his attention towards the empty lane that he hadn’t. ‘It was the man from the Manor but PC Rathbone thinks you’re him. He didn’t notice that the other car drove away and you’ve arrived in a different car. Are you sure you want to see him now?’

I stopped myself from turning this round into a plea to stay with a fierce jerk of determination. I was, I think, expecting the Captain to make his excuses to leave. I suppose I was encouraging it. I couldn’t see a way for him to come in without having to either lie or make me explain that he was not the same man that the other driver had been. And despite his repeated requests for discretion, I didn’t quite think lying was his usual habit. At the same time it was suddenly hitting me with the kind of tension that makes every part of the mind ache that I ought to really be wondering why that other man had called here, and how that man had known where to find me at all and what I would do if the burglar was only waiting for these people to go before coming back again.

To stop myself from seeing this second man as my salvation, I made myself wonder what he wanted from me now.

It was a fair question. The Captain was scrutinising my unsmiling face; trying to trace that hostility to its source. He hadn’t come here expecting this. I suppose he’d presumed the manner of my exit from his house hadn’t quite paved the way for plain unfriendliness.

I thought for a moment he might be imagining that I was trying to send him away without talking to the policeman because I was afraid of betraying that I was actually a party to the bald man’s actions. The Captain’s own features were carrying a question. But when his mouth finally moulded itself into speech, it wasn’t to announce his departure or add fuel to my increasing sense of isolation. It merely asked, ‘Are you going to let me in?’

I let him in. I stepped sideways with my hands still gripping that gate so that it swung on its hinges. Then, with one final guarded glance at my face, the Captain stepped past me onto the awkwardly narrow space of the path and on into the hallway of my cousin’s house. With no steps to climb, there was no sign of the faint unevenness in his stride now. I eased the gate shut and followed. I was in time to hear his opening greeting to the policeman. It was astounding after all he had made me swear not to say.

The Captain said coolly, ‘I don’t believe we’ve met. Captain Richard Langton. Has Miss Sutton told you about her encounter with an unusual car today? No? You should know that there is a man in this neighbourhood who has taken to driving about at speed and indulging in near-misses with pedestrians.’

I thought his manner was designed to carry meaning for me, I don’t know why. Well, actually, I did know why; I just didn’t like it. It struck me that this steady release of information was the Captain’s way of exerting control over me and this scene, and the idea was deeply, unreasonably offensive. I didn’t want to be cast in a passive role here. Not even when the act itself might have been intended to assure me that he believed that my nervousness belonged to something more complicated than the guilt of being caught red-handed meeting his burglar. The Captain might have been exposing our secret to the policeman purely to reduce the threat I might pose if he should prove to have been wrong about me. But it was more likely that the Captain thought the threat to me was unmanageable enough that I needed to be sheltered by someone like him; someone like an experienced soldier who would choose for me which decisive action to take. Any minute now and he’d be telling me not to worry again.

I approached as the policeman asked him seriously, ‘Really?’ PC Rathbone drew out his notebook again and licked the tip of his pencil. ‘Can you describe the car?’

The Captain had heard my tread on the step and was gracious enough to step aside slightly to allow me to join them in the gloom of Aunt Edna’s coat-rack. There seemed to be some expectation that I would answer. Both the men fixed their gazes upon me. But when I drew a hesitant breath, the Captain recounted crisply, ‘Black paintwork. A Ford perhaps, but I shouldn’t think it was locally owned since there aren’t many cars of any sort round here and the driver is dressed like a neat little businessman. Aged about forty, sorry, fifty.’ A nod to me. ‘He called at the Manor earlier. Apparently he picked up one of Miss Sutton’s bags and gave her a fright and now he’s just turned up here.’

He was, I noticed, continuing the theme of making light of the loss of my things and I didn’t like that either.

But I didn’t do anything about it. I stood there, hugging myself and mute, in my cousin’s hallway while PC Rathbone swelled complacently. ‘Perhaps this little chap called here to make his apologies and saw my machine outside and took fright himself?’

The policeman’s lower lip was puckering in an enquiring sort of way. I felt compelled to say in a voice made tight and rapid by something that came close to temper, ‘Perhaps. But you should know that the man wasn’t all that little and he really had no reason to take my case.’

It was then that I saw the expression behind the Captain’s eyes quite suddenly. He’d been hiding it before behind his calm assertion of command over these proceedings. I knew now this had simply been his own natural urge to establish order here while he calculated how far my ongoing hostility implied my efforts towards secrecy were indicative of a separate, deeper complication. And his urge to take charge was contradicted by his appreciation for my protection of his father. I added nothing more and watched him read the faint slackening of my lips.

There was the barest flicker of recognition in that hazel gaze. Then the Captain waited as the policeman jotted down a few notes. As the last line was written and the notebook snapped shut, the man from the Manor added, ‘You’ll naturally be adding this house to your round later, won’t you, Constable?’

The notebook was put away in a breast pocket. ‘Naturally,’ agreed the policeman. Then he dragged his helmet from under his arm and set it upon his curly crown. He stepped neatly past the Captain and then me and out onto the path. He turned back momentarily on the threshold. ‘By the way,’ he asked. ‘Did this man take anything else from the Manor?’

I felt the Captain’s hesitation behind me like a whisper in my mind. I felt compelled to say, ‘I expect Captain Langton hasn’t had time to look properly yet.’

And then PC Rathbone was passing through my gate and settling himself onto his motorcycle. He wasn’t really interested in any of this anyway. The Captain didn’t leave. And hostility didn’t quite go either. Now that the tricky business of managing the rival impulses of protectiveness and truth to a policeman was over, this other part of my experience at the Manor still wanted something from me, even if it wasn’t a guilty confession. I felt it with the same insistence that had made a strange bald man briefly linger with me on the staircase there. That time the man had abruptly changed his mind and left, clipping my ear with my own suitcase as he went. This man didn’t move. I watched the policeman go and then I carefully avoided acknowledging that the Captain was in turn scrutinising me. Unexpectedly, there was doubt here still and a sense that he was finding the contrast between my withdrawal now and my almost naïve helpfulness on the telephone very hard to read.

It made me deliberately voice what needed to be said. With my eyes still on the now empty trackway, I observed, ‘You told the policeman about our visitor.’

The Captain laughed. Contemplating the same view that captivated me, he said, ‘I’m not a lunatic. I might well have begged you to help me keep my father away from official notice but I was hardly likely to disregard the news that this man has now taken to calling at your house.’

His friendliness was my cue to shut the door and put an end to all that tension and I moved to do it, only to realise it would leave us together in a very intimate setting. Too intimate. I’d expected my unease to go with the policeman only it hadn’t, or at least distrust had changed into a very different kind of nervousness. It was because I suspected that, for him, friendliness was just another way to take charge. Which was a very unkind thing to think but still it most definitely felt too close to be shut up with him in here in this tiny house with its tiny rooms and even smaller kitchen, waiting for him to smoothly lead me towards hearing whatever he’d come here to say. So instead I stood there with my hand on the open door and I told him, ‘No, perhaps you weren’t. But you might have made more of the theft of my baggage.’

‘I was thinking you might yourself.’

This was said more coolly. It drew my gaze at last. His expression was bold, clear. It wasn’t an accusation but he meant me to answer the question that hung over my behaviour. He proved it when he remarked, ‘You stepped in when the policeman asked that last awkward question.’ A deeper intensity of interest that carried the faintest of concessions towards real gratitude. ‘Why did you do that?’

I replied rather coldly, ‘It strikes me that I ought to be asking you to explain what was taken, since I’ve obviously saved you from having to lie to a policeman. Only I don’t want to know. I can state quite firmly that I really don’t. If it is the sort of thing you couldn’t tell the policeman I don’t think I should know either.’

For a moment the Captain was actually disconcerted. It clearly grated to have his integrity questioned. ‘Don’t say it like that. Please. My idea of the seriousness of what I stepped into an hour ago escalated the moment that fellow turned up at your garden gate and I don’t know why I didn’t tell PC Rathbone. It’s in part this damned sense this place gives that one careless word will cause my father a whole deal of fuss. But,’ he added, ‘at least this particular oversight is easily remedied. Thanks to you I will be able to tell the man later.’

I believed him, I didn’t know why. The Captain had been urging concealment from the start but all the same I believed him when he said this place was the sort to fix shackles upon a person. Only in my mind the ties of his sense of duty and the history of this place had more the appearance of a snare. There was still the impulse to shed the lot and be rude by ushering him away to his car.

I felt beneath my fingertips the rough pitting of a scrape in the old oak of the front door. In a voice that was certainly softer if not yet ready to move beyond that to true warmth, I asked, ‘Why did you come to see me? You didn’t know I was set for an interview with the police, did you, so it can’t have been because you wanted to act as a censor upon what I said in my statement? And you can’t have known the burglar was about to knock on my door.’

He told me plainly, ‘It was the fact you took the trouble to make up a plate of bread and salad stuff for me on your way out. Is that a terrible thing to say?’

My expression made him laugh. ‘Obviously it is,’ he remarked, still smiling a little. ‘Well, the long and the short of it is, I’d had a terrible night followed by an even stranger morning and in the midst of it all, the young woman who seemed to be the principal cause of my unplanned arrival here took the time to leave some lunch for me. It was,’ he added more seriously, ‘a reminder of a simple bit of humanity and, I might say, a sobering experience.’

As olive branches went, it was a good one. It was utterly disarming. It made me willing to smile at last myself. It shook away the expectation I’d had that he was only here to assure himself that I was keeping my promise of silence. It proved that he hadn’t come to bully me a little more. Unfortunately, his apology also had the effect of removing my control over this scene once and for all.

It gave me room to fully experience that other, less willingly acknowledged fear that resided beside the one that belonged to the visitation of that other man in the black Ford.

That car had carried the usual dread that I was going to be made to confront some of the darker aspects of this world. This other fear belonged solely to this Captain. It began with the realisation that I’d bristled right up to the moment that I’d shown that I cared to help him manage the toll this burglary would take on his father, and at that moment I’d let him glimpse what nervousness really lay beneath. There was a very faint trace of that protectiveness in his manner still and this time it was directed at me rather than his father. It was disconcertingly unexpected. It was made all the more confusing because I thought it was an instinctive part of his nature rather than a conscious decision to be kind. It was like being wrapped in a tender touch. Except that this was again an encounter with the decisive habits of a soldier. He knew I had been frightened and now I had to deal with the familiar expectation that I was set to receive soothing platitudes and the supposedly reassuring news that he hadn’t come here to force me to hear what he wanted me to do for him next. Because, to a man like this, I had never been judged capable of doing anything of any use at all.

Very deliberately I focused on the simple social nicety that was probably all he really wanted from me anyway. ‘Tea?’ I asked, and walked ahead of him into the kitchen.

We took our tea outside. I’d mistakenly directed him out there with the idea that there were some folding chairs beneath the window, but there weren’t. Luckily he didn’t seem to object to me sitting on the warm stone of the front step while he leaned against the doorframe and we both turned our faces to the sun and sipped our tea.

After a while, memory suddenly prodded me into asking, ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to find somewhere to sit inside? On account of your sprained ankle, I mean.’

I glanced up at him to catch the brief shake of his head. He told me, ‘I’d rather stand, if you don’t mind.’

I didn’t mind. I was sitting with legs stretched out and idly crossed at the feet and revelling in the blazing scents of an English vegetable garden at the height of its summer glory. This was what the Manor lacked.

‘I lied to you earlier.’ He waited until I lifted my gaze to him again. ‘When I said it was a sprain. The truth is, I was a little taken aback that you’d noticed. It’s the usual sorry story of an old injury that flares up if it takes a sudden knock. Unfortunately, in my case, an old injury that won’t quite resolve itself is the sort of thing that ends a career and I’m working very hard to keep mine. So please don’t let on that you know.’

‘Why are you telling me at all?’

‘I’m trying to say I’m sorry. For being rude to you again.’

I returned my gaze to the gravel by my step. I had been rolling it and ordering each grain in that abstract way people have when they are really thinking deeply about something else. Such as how confidently he wore his citified clothes – not with the sort of confidence that makes a person swagger, but the sort where they firmly believe they are fit to meet anything, wherever they are. Whereas I was pretty sure I was looking very much out of my element, and wearing my only remaining frock in the whole wide world, and a tired one at that.

I deliberately made my hand mess up the little lines of stones and told him easily, ‘You don’t need to apologise to me. You weren’t to know I wasn’t … well, whatever it is you suspect me of.’

‘Suspected, Emily. I wondered if you were from a newspaper. Or at least tied to one – hence all the questions about your family.’

The insinuation was so unexpected that it made me laugh. I thought he was almost smiling himself as he added, ‘The thought had crossed my mind that your sudden arrival and interest in prowling about the attics of my father’s house might well have been because you were a woman with a nose for a good story. I’ve even wondered if you were the sort who would be prepared to create a bigger one if the connection forged by Bertie’s assault between my father and Matthew Croft proved too tenuous.’

There was something mildly flattering about the idea he had been accusing me – idly at the very least – of actually orchestrating something on the grand scale of a scheme like that. My voice was suddenly itself again. Friendly and cheerful. ‘Good heavens. Has that happened before?’

‘Not directly like that, no. But if you discount the part of the unknown female, not dissimilar. And the consequences were, shall we say, dangerous for the health of all concerned.’

That shut off my mirth like a switch. I twisted so quickly to look at him that my tea slopped. He didn’t, it must be said, look like a man who was confessing to the use of his hands for the purpose of silencing a journalist. The injury was probably more personal than that. Presumably his father again. ‘Heavens,’ I said again, more sincerely. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t be.’ A glimmer of a smile before I turned away once more. ‘Or at least if you must feel sympathy, keep it for people like you who’ve had the misfortune of touching an old wound. I think for once I have been worrying about this more than my father does. The problem has its origins in the period before my brother drew all eyes to him, so at least I can’t blame him for all this, and I am finally learning now to understand our value to the newspapers and how to keep it from preying on my sense of proportion. Or, at least, I thought I had but, as you say, my behaviour today proves the contrary, perhaps.’

A wry twist had entered his voice. He knew I hadn’t said that at all. His willingness to confide a small hint of the old habits that had influenced his recent behaviour was like a deliberate defiance of the distrust that had lurked between us since his arrival here. A peculiar pause slipped in afterwards like a shy beginning of better ease only, from the way he spoke next, it seemed more probable that he was securing the careful rebalancing of peace before the next distress worked its way in. I had a sudden sharp suspicion that he was steering me towards something. Then he only said gently, ‘I didn’t mean to treat you like a child, you know. How old are you?’

With deliberate tartness I told him, ‘Twenty-one. Just. How old are you?’

He was unfazed. ‘A considerably more experienced twenty-nine.’ He was teasing me. Beside me, I saw one trousered leg move to cross over the other as he relaxed in his turn and leaned back more comfortably against the wall. I heard the clink as he reset his teacup upon its saucer and set the pair of them down somewhere to one side. Then he said, ‘Were you serious when you said that you don’t want to know what else the man took besides your case?’

It was done so smoothly that I might have believed he was only making idle conversation. Only that suspicion lurked there waiting to return me to tension. From the tone of his voice I could imagine that he had his head back against the warm brickwork and his eyes closed against the heat of the sun. I didn’t turn to check. I said rather too firmly, ‘I was. Not unless it explains why he should have come to find me now.’ Clearly it didn’t since the Captain remained silent. Now I turned my head. ‘You know, I really don’t know who he is. I don’t know why he came to your house. I swear it isn’t me who brought him to this place. I can’t see how it has turned out to be anything to do with me at all.’

An eye opened against the glare and rolled down to me. He wasn’t accusing me of anything at all. He asked, ‘Did he follow you to this cottage, do you think?’ He was being very matter-of-fact. I liked him for it. It made it easier to relax. Until it dawned upon me in almost the same moment precisely who he was.

I was sitting here on the front step to my cousin’s modest little cottage while the squire’s son drank tea and listened as I talked as though we were equals. It was a mistake born of that wonderful glimpse of the familiar that the ringing telephone had given me yesterday. The truth was that in town our paths would quite frankly have never even crossed. Here they had and purely because he was – to borrow a phrase from Mrs Abbey – the new young master of these parts. I realised belatedly that this must simply be the Manor’s equivalent of a pastoral visit to a needy cottager – he didn’t want anything from me at all – and I was making a terrible faux pas.

First I answered his question hastily, ‘No, I’m absolutely certain he didn’t follow me. It took too long for him to get here. I think he must have gone through my bag at last and found the letter from my cousin. I can’t see how else he thought to come here.’ I added by way of an explanation, ‘She’d written the directions to her house in it.’

And having brushed off that concern just as quickly as I could, I added rather more formally, ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to sit somewhere more comfortable? I probably shouldn’t be keeping you anyway, having already ruined your day by dragging you out of London in the first place.’ I made to get up, but as I lifted my hand with its teacup – to keep it clear of my knees while I rose – I felt the tug on the delicate china as his hand moved to intercept.

He said, ‘I’ve already said I’m sorry, so please don’t do this. Don’t run away.’ And he took the teacup from me to set it down beside his own on the broad windowsill to his left. Across the faint rattle as china met brick, he told me with rather too much perception about the real cause of my discomfort, ‘I’m not trying to frighten you about this man. And you don’t have to talk about him if you don’t want to, or justify yourself to me either. I’m not accusing you of anything any more, or trying to wade in where I’m not needed. This isn’t my home, you know. I’ve no intention of stepping into my brother’s shoes and acting the part of the new master about this place. And that means I can freely make a promise to leave off undermining the tranquillity of a certain young woman whose only mistake was to expend an absurd amount of energy sorting out a few homely comforts for my father.’

It was there again; the question that I thought we’d left behind. It was the urge to ask me why I’d done it at all. And the uncomfortably exacting suggestion that it wasn’t enough to simply answer that he’d asked me to.

As it was, he didn’t ask that. Instead, and a shade too promptly for it to escape feeling like a fresh accusation, he asked, ‘Why are you here? And don’t tell me it’s to holiday with your cousin because Hannis has already told me that she’s in hospital.’

He must have caught my raised eyebrows as I settled back into my place on the front step, for all that I thought I had turned my head away. I heard him assure me wryly, ‘This isn’t a test, you know. I really am only trying to make conversation.’

My attention snapped back round to him. ‘Are you?’ I asked. Then I relented. I didn’t want to distrust him any more and this was the price. I told him, ‘This is a holiday. I didn’t even know Phyllis was in hospital until I arrived here yesterday and was met by Danny’s note. And anyway, what else do you call a trip that was supposed to be a change of scene, a brief get-away from the old life in town?’

‘You don’t intend to go back, though, do you?’ He was quick, this man.

‘How can you tell?’ I asked. I knew why.

‘I remember your decisive remark earlier about having no occupation. You don’t intend to go back to – what was it? – a chemist’s shop in Knightsbridge?’

I was sitting with my weight propped upon my straightened arms now and my hands laid palm down on either side of me upon the stone front step. The stone, the sky, everything, was ablaze and tension eased with a simple exhale of breath. The Captain wasn’t going to presume that I was taking a last solo holiday before preparing for a marriage because there was clearly no ring, so instead, since he had obviously committed to memory everything I’d said, he was going to ask the next inevitable question in the line for a single woman of my age, which was whether I was set to take over the reins of my father’s business now that the old man was hoping to retire. And I’d give my reply as a parody of the Captain’s own remark about being unwilling to step into his brother’s shoes and tell him that I felt the same about antiques. Only that wasn’t strictly true.

I’d ruled out that career for myself when I’d insisted on leaving school at fourteen. Even then, the routine of running my father’s shop would have been the most respectable choice and back then I might have been meek enough to have accepted it, but my father had been slow to offer it. He’d thought a few years of hard work in the real world would do me some good, rather than rewarding the abandonment of my education by letting me laze within the cosseted life of the family business. He’d also been wary of introducing a young daughter into a shop front and restoration workshop fundamentally occupied by men. My father knew it was the sort of path that led to an unwise marriage at a painfully young age. Which, I thought, made it all the more ironic that my father was now in the position of being ready to give almost anything if I would only choose the nice safe route of staffing his shop and thereby put myself in the way of a nice tame future with his favourite apprentice.

Today, in this pleasant sunshine, the man beside me, with the very different kind of presence, followed the predictable path. He asked that expected question about my future in the antiques trade. Only then I surprised myself by answering completely differently. Perhaps it was his easy self-assurance that made me brave enough to tell him, ‘I could go back, actually. I could manage the shop once I’ve finished indulging in improving stays with long-overlooked cousins. It’s what I’m supposed to do. But Dad doesn’t really need me there. He never did. One of the apprentices has survived his national service and has come back primed and ready to run the whole lot. I’d rather not get in his way.’

‘This counts as an improving stay?’

He’d caught my slip about the truth behind this visit. I wasn’t in the habit of lying, as such, but I will admit that I tended to find it hard to stay true to my purpose if there was a choice between saying what I thought and hurting someone I cared about, or saying what they wanted to hear and, through that, picking the route that was quietest. It was cowardice, I supposed. So it was perhaps lucky for me that this man wanted to hear what I thought I ought to say. And there wasn’t really any danger that I would hurt him with this.

‘Very well,’ I conceded. ‘The truth is, my parents are pursuing the much-exercised route of giving me the chance to experience a few hard knocks in the wider world before it’s too late and I’m out in it with no chance of return.’

He was quick with his reply. ‘I should have thought,’ he remarked dryly, ‘you’d experienced quite enough of the wider world as it was, growing up through the past few years in London. Haven’t your parents left it a bit late to take fright and evacuate their daughter to the country?’

I grinned. ‘You think I’m here like a forlorn child with my name on a tag about my neck, waiting for an aged relative to claim me? Not a bit of it. My father isn’t really an overbearing sort of parent, you know. It’s me that is torturing him. I gave him a fright by first telling him that I was going to leave school and aim for adulthood at the age of fourteen; and then again as soon as I reached sixteen and I took to filling the gaps left in the dance halls as well since the older women were stumbling into hasty marriages with their brave RAF men in between bombing runs. Now I’m a grown woman and confusing him all over again by giving up the job I had to argue my way into taking in the first place and, actually, this visit to see my cousin wasn’t his idea. It was my mother’s. And besides all that, it was my choice to come here too.’

If he noticed my defensiveness about the course of the decision-making, he didn’t show it. I cast him a shy glance. ‘Did your …?’ I began then flushed. ‘No, sorry, never mind. Ignore that.’

My companion prompted calmly, ‘Did my what?’ When I only shook my head mutely, he added, ‘Do you mean to ask if my father is similarly dictating my choice of career? No. The Langton name has been put to many different enterprises, good and bad, but when it came to joining the army I found – how shall I put it? – well, without going into the details, it was easy to find this was one aspect that was purely me. I had the expectation from an early age that I would follow in Father’s footsteps and by the time I was about your age I was already there.’

I remarked carefully, ‘When you were my age you must have been getting ready to fight.’

He confirmed, ‘I was in my first command at the outbreak of conflict.’

I’d been right; he did find honesty easier than I did. There was not even sadness there, nor regret for the state of war. There was assurance and a sense that the military life was a vital part of this man’s idea of self-worth.

I stirred restlessly. Suddenly a whisper of that old distress crept close again. I knew I’d asked but there had been a reference to his brother in there somewhere. And perhaps the shadow of something else that was too deep for the cautious gossip recounted by my cousin’s letters. It seemed to me that even if he didn’t find it sad, to me there was something awful about a man being brought up to believe that a hard, destructive career such as his was the counterbalance that restored his value. Unfortunately, I think the Captain noticed my flinch. I could feel his gaze on me as he observed, ‘You do try very hard for peacefulness, don’t you? You don’t want to talk about our little balding friend any more than you have to. And you really didn’t lie when you said you won’t hear the gossip about my brother …’

He had noticed that I’d shied from his reference to the weight that rested on the Langton family name. He must have noticed that I’d shied from his mention of war too. It struck me that he really did make a habit of considering all the subtleties of everything that was said. All along he’d been working to solve the puzzle of who I was and lead me into explaining the cause of my unwillingness to discuss the darker aspects of what had happened at the Manor. I suppose he was afraid it meant something more serious was afoot. So he’d given himself time to study me and this was the result. Well, he must know I was a harmless fool by now.

‘I do try for peacefulness.’ I mimicked his phrasing a shade bitterly. ‘If you must know, my decision to pay this visit came just after I made the mistake of mentioning to my parents that, amongst other things, I think I’m a pacifist. Or a conscientious objector, or something like that. At least, I would be if I were a man and required to do something about it. It’s not a particularly socially acceptable thing to confess at the moment, is it? So much so my father took it as a sign I was concealing something else. I’d abandoned the nice safe prospect of a future in his shop and left a perfectly respectable job at the chemists, and according to him, it’s not like me to do that without having the nice logical prop of marriage or retirement to make the decision for me. He became convinced that a severe emotional loss must have slipped in somewhere along the way and he just hadn’t noticed before now. And since I’d just been ranting about seeking peaceful solutions, I could hardly stand and argue the point, could I?’

I knew it sounded feeble. It made me finish on a lame note of excuse, ‘The truth is I can’t even see my mother’s cat with a mouse without wishing to intervene.’

I turned my head. He saw my defiance – I knew this would be seen as a challenge to a man who made war his business. He also saw that I was ready to be humbled. He didn’t do it. Perhaps it was the mark of a soldier that he didn’t make a stand on a point that was already won.

Instead he took that same note of practical calm as he remarked, ‘Forgive me, but haven’t you got something the wrong way round there? I had understood that the basic principle of avoiding conflict meant that you didn’t intervene. Unless your philosophy is based solely on the premise that you possess sufficiently superior strength to render all opposition futile. What would you do if the cat were the size of a tiger and you couldn’t just pick him up?’

It was a fair point. He would naturally think along the lines of irrepressible nature, both within the cat and its victim, and of solutions being dependent on superior force so that all sides might be cowed into perfect peace. And perhaps he was right and I wasn’t a true pacifist. Something certainly cut too close to a nerve that had already been set on edge by the bizarre contradiction of wishing this man would go away, changing my mind and then reverting again just as soon as he began to talk about his career, only to find myself at the same time really, really treasuring the experience of talking seriously like this.

It made me say with a better attempt at honesty than before, ‘Tell me that peace means days and nights spent hiding in holes while the danger that is raging outside switches between the fury of a foreign power trying to reduce an entire city to embers and our own people who are cheerfully picking through the smouldering rubble.’

‘You mean looters?’ My slur had startled him. His manner had suddenly grown harder to match. Perhaps he felt I’d meant the point as a personal barb. I supposed people like him tended to be kept safely anaesthetised from that particularly commendable of aspect of our resilience to the Blitz. It wouldn’t do for a soldier to realise that the people for whom he was laying down his life were utterly, entirely, ordinary and flawed, and therefore potentially undeserving of the sacrifice.

It cooled my readiness to be defensive. It curbed whatever I had intended to say next. I wasn’t trying to hurt him. I was simply trying to explain the rest. I added with a wry smile, ‘It really is quite unfortunate, don’t you think, that I’ve come here to establish a little calm, to shake the dust of a ruined city from my boots, so to speak, and within the first twenty-four hours I’ve received absolute proof that the war might end and the world might change, but absolutely nothing alters human nature.’

After a moment, the Captain observed mildly, ‘Bertie’s attack and the little invasion at the Manor really have frightened you, haven’t they?’

The sudden steadiness in the Captain’s voice after its momentary roughness made me jump. Now I realised with a peculiar little shock that his protectiveness was there again in a faint whisper, and sympathy without ridicule.

‘Actually, no,’ I told him with an odd little shiver. It had jolted my mind more than it ought to hear the attack on Mr Winstone grouped with the loss of my bag. It’s shameful to admit but I’d almost forgotten about yesterday in the effort of tiptoeing around talking about today. ‘Or, at least, the truth is I’m not really upset about them. It isn’t really about those people and what they’ve done. It’s about me and the fact that I’m desperately hoping everything will be different now – now the war is over, I mean – only I’m afraid nothing is going to be very different at all. Days like yesterday prove it. At least, I think they do.’ A hapless smile. ‘I know this feeling begins with the knowledge that war made people like you give up something profoundly personal for the sake of a mass of people you’d never even met and—’

‘And now you’re afraid it’s your turn? Because you know we fought for ourselves too.’

His interjection rather derailed what I had been meaning to say. Probably for the best. So instead I agreed and conceded an easier truth, ‘Perhaps. But yesterday, Mr Winstone was a stranger to me. When I found him on his path and the fellow who’d dropped him there slid away, I don’t know what I’d have done if that man had come back.’

‘Screamed the place down, probably,’ the Captain remarked in the same lighter tone, ‘until someone came to help. Or else discovered just how much physical force you’re truly capable of exerting under extreme pressure. And I should say that it fully explains why you should have been left feeling quite so unsettled, since neither of them are remotely appealing prospects. Not when the one implies unbeatable odds, and the other is an introduction to a part of oneself that doesn’t bear contemplation on a quiet summer’s day in the country.’

He’d surprised me. I’d expected him to either assure me that there had been no danger at all or to smile and contradict my attempt to measure the assistance I had given to an old man against his own experience as a soldier. I hadn’t expected understanding like this.

‘Quite,’ I agreed. I found myself smiling suddenly. ‘I know I have my limitations, but I honestly don’t know how capable I am of rising to the defence of a stranger in the way that has been routinely demanded of people like you. I’ve never even had to learn how far I would go to save someone I truly cared about, and quite honestly, my hope for a different kind of life ahead really, really depends on never being required to find out. So there you have the truth of my pacifism. The cowardly confession of a woman who managed to get all the way through a war without being called on to do anything useful and who is desperate to keep it that way now that she’s an adult and she’s got no more excuses.’

An uncomfortable pause while my gaze returned to its steady examination of the contents of my cousin’s garden and then, abruptly, I lurched into answering the question he’d really been asking all along. ‘And that is in part why I didn’t tell PC Rathbone everything about my lost suitcase just now – it wasn’t purely because I can appreciate your wish to protect your father. At least not fully. It’s because I can’t bear to feel indebted for something I won’t ever repay, not even when it’s the person’s job. If I’d told the policeman about all this, he’d have been obliged to take steps for my safety and fuss and worry and then I’d have to admit this was more serious than I want it to be. I’d never be able to get things onto a normal track.’

This time when he spoke, it was in a very odd voice. ‘You really do mean that, don’t you?’

‘Probably,’ I replied. I shook it all away with a decisive little squaring of my shoulders. I had my hands clasped about my knees now. I turned my head over my shoulder to look up at him. ‘And,’ I added with a wry grin and an easier slide into truthfulness, ‘I’ve unexpectedly explained my motives far better to you than I ever managed for my parents, so if I still haven’t managed to explain myself coherently I’m afraid you’ll just have to make up the rest for yourself.’

‘I understand you.’ The confirmation was given in a manner that suited the sudden shift in mine, but there was something in his steadiness that told me I’d revealed more about myself in those last few lines than all our past words together. His expression wasn’t really betraying any of the reactions I might have expected, but I thought I’d suddenly crossed over from the girl he couldn’t comprehend into the woman he understood only too well.

Then he straightened from his lean against the wall. His manner was suddenly decisive. I saw his glance at his watch. He was about to go and suddenly I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t want to be left alone with the worry about deciding between keeping watch from behind a locked front door or making a dash through quiet lanes for the shop where I might telephone for a car to carry me down to Gloucester. And, of course, I knew I would never be able to escape the one real worry, which was that I was destined now to spend the rest of the day re-running what I’d just laid bare to this man, and finding far too many reasons to feel ashamed.

The Captain was asking me crisply, ‘What do you plan to do now since you can’t stay here? Will you catch a train home?’

‘Go home? No.’ My initial surprise and then the twist of amusement that formed my negative made my cheeks burn. I thought that had given away rather too much of my feelings too. I always had felt that I’d never been particularly hard to read. This was proof of it.

‘Well then, Emily, this is going to sound more than a little ridiculous after all but turning you out of the house earlier, but actually I’d like your help. And don’t look at me like that. It’s true.’ There was a brief hint of a reassuring smile. ‘Have you eaten, by the way?’

My mood lifted to match his. ‘I have. I took the remaining two eggs for my lunch.’

‘Good. Well, my proposal is this: Tomorrow I have to go into Gloucester for a meeting and I thought you might like to come along and call in at the hospital to see your cousin. From what I know of hospital stays, I imagine she’d appreciate the sight of a friendly face. That’s the bribe. The fee is that today, after all I’ve said about refusing to play my brother’s part here, it just so happens that I’ve committed myself to acting out the role of the squire’s son to the extent of running my father’s errands. Today that involves making contact with various people who by virtue of being either staff or tenant or both are deemed the Manor’s responsibility. I’ve spent an hour already speaking to all the people who could be reached by telephone. Now I’ve got to go and see the next person on the list and I’d be very glad if you would come with me. Don’t ask me why because I think I’d better not say. Let’s just allow that, amongst other reasons, I’ve been made aware through an intensive run of correspondence in recent months that some of our tenants possess a certain habit for tying people up with little chores and although I hope I’m not susceptible, I really haven’t got the time to find out I’m wrong. Will you come? Please? We can add your fee to the account. Otherwise, you can cut your losses on your trip here and I’ll drive you now to meet the next London train …’

There was something bewildering about the frankness of his offer. It was like he really was hoping I would choose to go with him. It made it easier to do what I wanted, somehow.

And in making that choice, it was with a lighter feeling than I might have expected that I belatedly went to pay the visit to Eddington that Mrs Abbey had briefly been determined to get me to make late last night.

Chapter 9

‘Were you Blitzed, Emily?’

The question came out of a companionable silence. I turned my head from the scene arcing away beyond the glass in the passenger window to the driver beside me. In the main, experience had taught me that when a person wondered if someone was ‘Blitzed’, they were meaning that this person had lately taken to acting irrationally, hysterically and excessively sensitively. The term was only ever applied to excitable females, usually out of their hearing and more often than not accompanied by a discussion of their emotional state that would end with a condescending variation of ‘never mind her. She was Blitzed, poor dear’

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